There is a Welsh word, hiraeth, which describes a longing for home – particularly one that is hard to return to, often because it exists in memory. Town of Strangers deals with this amorphous Celtic feeling as writer, director and principal cinematographer Treasa O’Brien asks people in the town of Gort, one of the most diverse towns in Ireland, what home means to them and how they came to be in this unlikely place.
People who have come from elsewhere – Syrian refugees, Traveller teenagers, Brazilian meat factory workers, hippies from England, or people from just down the road – are interviewed in neutral spaces and in their houses, making coffee, tending to their gardens, cooking, doing their makeup. ‘Home’ in this sense consists of a series of actions as much as it does of a physical space. All the while those filmed reveal intimate stories of their families, loves and journeys. They describe people they miss, things they’ve left behind, their dreams. The filmmaker treats them all with equal dignity, as their testimonies shape the documentary.
The film is referred to throughout, and the process of filming, such as setting up backdrops, people preening ready for the camera to roll and snapping into action, is itself filmed. The mutual antagonism at play between those in front of and those behind the camera is intriguing to observe. There are moments in which the director seems exhausted, sometimes caught in an air of fazed abandon while leaning against a laundrette washing machine. Her process and the purpose of the project appears to be developing in real time, which is strange and mesmerising to witness.
Town of Strangers, for all that it concerns real people and their sometimes terribly real stories of seeking refuge, has an eerie, folkloric quality largely thanks to the cinematography: shots pan upwards unexpectedly; children amble unexplained between trees in the woods; teenagers sneak into abandoned houses to play imaginary instruments; and O’Brien’s bright red van – also her home – drifts through the grey town, a constant metaphor for the alien.
“They say there are two stories,” says our interlocutor to the camera, sitting in the doorway of her van and eating out of a saucepan, “A stranger comes to a town, or a person goes on a journey.” The question as to which one this is hovers – it’s both. Maybe she’s the stranger. Maybe we are. But the journey is undoubtedly homewards. Though Town of Strangers is disconcerting in its construction, experimental and certainly not smooth, it feels like a film made with such determination that it is hard to question its integrity as it evolves into a thoughtful and manifold musing on versions of home, and on filmmaking itself.
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ANTICIPATION.
Interesting premise, but looks so grey and dismal. 3
ENJOYMENT.
Bewildering at times, but formally feels like something new. 3
IN RETROSPECT.
It lingers in the memory. 4
Directed by
Treasa O’Brien
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