Glasgow Short Film Festival Barbed Wire Love 3: Maeve

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.

Asserting that "Men's relationship to women is just like England's relationship to Ireland," Maeve is a heart-rendingly smart and dissident feminist film, shot at the height of the troubles when the only other film crews in Belfast were chasing ambulances.

“Don’t tell me how I’m supposed to be!” Maeve’s sharp retort to her boyfriend still resonates. Influenced by Brecht and Godard, it was co-directed by Pat Murphy and John Davies. Murphy was a founder member of feminist film and video distribution network Circles during her time in London and the film gleefully utilises its tactics for feminism in order to tell the story of a young woman going home to Belfast after years in London.

"A cast member of (Lizzie Borden’s) Born in Flames… Murphy made an equally explosive film in Maeve – one that comes close to home…in the era of Brexit and feminism. "
Independent Cinema Office

Curated by Myrid Carten and Peter Taylor.