October 26 @ 8:00 pm – 10:30 pm
A few months after the release of Beyond Kathmandu, his first feature-length documentary, Alexander Murphy, a Franco-Irish filmmaker, turns his camera on his homeland, Ireland. In Irish Travellers, he captures the hectic daily life of the O’Reillys, a Traveler family and the last representatives of a culture that is slowly disappearing. A bungalow door slamming shut, a few chords from Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2, and a parade of redheads so numerous you quickly lose count: this is the O’Reilly family.
Along a road in southern Ireland, in County Tipperary, Pa’ and Lisa live with their ten children in an isolated trailer on the outskirts of their community, Ireland’s nomadic Traveller minority. Spanning four seasons across four chapters, Franco-Irish director Alexander Murphy captures a life on the fringes of the fringes, where heating breakdowns and homework to be reviewed punctuate daily family life—just like anywhere else—in a meticulously choreographed ballet, far removed from the folklore of the nomadic imagination.
