Mairéad McClean’s short film Moving Lives, a collaboration with the Live and Learn initiative of National Museums Northern Ireland, presents the lived experience of Irish migration from multiple vantage points through space, time and memory.

Representing movements in several directions (immigration, emigration, return migration) and stages (leaving, journeying, arriving), the film weaves together the stories of migrants from the distant past up until recent times narrated in their own voices, through their correspondence, and in the multi-generational memories passed to their descendants.

Filmed on location at the Ulster American Folk Park – an outdoor migration museum in County Tyrone – in the enclosed setting of a dimly-lit nineteenth-century ‘old world’ mass house, the film challenges the illusory fixedness of its backdrop with an exploration of lives moving through space and time, transcending standard chronologies and uncovering universal experience beyond the Irish context.

Article source and full lenght text: Irish Times, Generation Emigration Blog.