Coming Home | 1994 | 16mm Film | 40'

Filmed and Edited by Moira Sweeney

An Arts Council of England | Channel 4 Commission

Featured: Channel 4 Out of the Blue Series; Banff Arts Centre, Canada

Festivals: British Short Film Festival, Galway Film Fleadh

Adopting the format of a travelogue,Coming Home comprises beautiful footage from The Philippines, West Africa, Brazil, Norway and Ireland with highly personal voice-over narration, spoken by the director. Initially the movement in space is infinitely easier on the viewer than the director's movement in time, back to her childhood. As the film progresses, though, both visions merge into a portrait of a person and her imaginary place. Throughout the film a troubled narrator grafts her vision onto the landscape of four continents – but this is a romantic narrator who can, while discussing the hardships and violence of these desperate cultures, also create visual homogeneity through the eye that looks for beauty and rejects oppression.

Film Ireland, 1994