Glasgow Short Film Festival Barbed Wire Love 2: Ancestral Homes

Fifty-two years since the commencement of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, Barbed Wire Love presents intimate tales from those who stayed, those who left and those who passed through. Sisters and brothers, those who danced at raves, those who had good intentions and those who did not. Chance encounters, intimate first-person cinema and the unreliability of history and biography create space for wry humour and tiny ecstasies.

With clear glimpses into, around and beyond violences proximal and peripheral to the North of Ireland, these are films which begin to describe a contested place and its social politics. Crossing genders, cruising lock-ins; moving from Tyrone to Vienna to Derry to Los Angeles and returning home to the cul-de-sacs of Eden, Barbed Wire Love creates new possibilities for connection.

Disarming narratives of a Northern Ireland that is too often characterised by fear and victimhood, these short films from Simon Aeppli, Michael Barwise, Julia Fiona Brown, Oona Doherty and Seamus Harahan have agency and vitality. Punk aesthetics and playful attitudes reinvigorate the old frameworks and stereotypes. Each filmmaker here has a unique voice that troubles the relationship between place and subject usually depicted in Northern Ireland media coverage.

Curated by Myrid Carten and Peter Taylor.