Glasgow Short Film Festival Barbed Wire Love 1: Trouble

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.

Opening film Trouble begins in Vienna, when filmmaker Mariah Garnett meets her father David, whom she hasn’t seen since the age of 2. Their faltering relationship leads us on an odyssey tracing a radical civil rights centered politics and nuance that has long since fallen out of media accounts and representations of Northern Ireland. Connecting with David through reenactments of the BBC news feature that drove him out of town, Garnett queers history and makes it new again.

Screened at BFI London and New York Film Festivals during the last few months of 2019, Barbed Wire Love’s opening feature, offers an opportunity to get up close with a film that the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine crowned “one of the year’s best documentaries”.

Curated by Myrid Carten and Peter Taylor.