Glasgow Short Film Festival Barbed Wire Love 5: Dusty Raves

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.

In the final programme of the strand, Dusty Bluebells, a remarkable 1970s portrait of street songs and games is paired with Dancing on Narrow Ground. Commissioned by Channel 4 but never aired on television as it trod on too many toes, Des Bell’s film is part mission impossible, part rain sodden Greecian tragedy as two groups of young ravers from Belfast try to reach rave heaven in the legendary Kelly’s Nightclub on Northern Ireland’s North Atlantic coast.

Curated by Myrid Carten and Peter Taylor.