Experimental Film Society · Films

The Poorhouse Revisited (2011)

Synopsis

In the time of Ireland’s Great Famine, an elderly gravedigger revisits a traumatic event through the decaying visions of his fragmented dreams. The film reworks the discarded, decayed 16mm rushes of a 1996 period drama — unearthed years later on Dublin’s Ringsend Peninsula — restoring and re-editing the corrupted frames so that they resemble fragments of memory distorted by time and its natural elements. Through layers of cracked emulsion, images struggle to re-surface and find a place on screen, as memories for a new audience, their pathos accentuated by their delicate state of fragmented survival.

Credits

Restoration & Edit: Michael Higgins
Original Score: Brian Conniffe & Suzanne Walsh