Home Thoughts From Abroad
This series of 7 x 4 minute actuality driven packages is in production for broadcast on Newstalk 106 - 108 FMs prime time strands. Part financed by the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland's Sound & Vision Fund., each package features an articulate and passionate member of our growing immigrant community as they introduce us to their home country from the context of their life in Ireland.
An audio portrait of that person and their dual cultural experiences is conveyed.
The approach is inspired by the producer’s own experience of being an emigrant in the UK where often on a crowded tube, waiting tables in a temporary job or in the throes of producing media projects, I’d be arrested in my tracks by a vivid image of my birthplace, the smell of freshly mown hay, an outrageous anecdote of my father’s or some hoo-hah at a family / social event and inspite of the daily demands, I’d be immediately transported in my imagination back home to the heart of the recollection.
Kwa Daniels, DJ, Club promoter & teacher living in Derry, considers his life in Ireland and the extent to which his Ghanaian roots as he experienced them as a child growing up in London continue to inspire and inform him as he goes about his work in clubs and schools North & South
As Aurelie O’Sullivan guides her novice falconers fumbling with birds of prey, this French Falconer, married to a Longford man and working in Ireland’s School of Falconry at Ashford Castle, Co. Mayo, is wistful about the life she left behind in France.
Marcel & Martha Otten run Man Made Images, the only commercial photographic gallery from their adopted Co. Donegal home in Mount Charles. As they glance out across Donegal Bay, Martha thinks of her Indonesian childhood while Marcel proudly proclaims that he has absolutely no thoughts of his Dutch homeland and is much relieved to have now fixed his roots here.
Kasia Lech juggles stints as an actor (most recent Irish TV credit House), acting coach and storyteller in her adopted home of Dublin as she completes her PhD at UCD. It’s her all consuming passion for books that trigger her tearful & often idealised thoughts of Poland & her granny’s garden.
Miquel Barceló dubs himself a professional fool As he dismantles the set following a Galway run of his latest Gombeens Street Show with performing partner, Jonathan Gunning, Miquel muses on his Spanish childhood. Now married to a Galway girl and father of two, he’s made Headford’s Carrnacrow not Catalunia, home for the foreseeable future.
Little did Elvizy, a 26 year old Brazilian rapper and casual labourer think that he’d be spending the past two years in and out of hospital healing his leg which has finally had to be amputated folllowing an MRSA infection contracted whilst having surgery for a broken leg. Elvis came to Ireland four years ago to enhance his chances of providing for his then 3 year old daughter back home in Western Brazil. After being hit by a horse on the Loughrea Farm at which he was employed, his destiny has been set. But the two year confinement has reignited his creative drive as he gets to grips with computer editing in graphics and film. An inspirational man in the face of adversity, his thoughts of home are triggered by images of his daughter and their weekly phonecalls as he stoically learns how to use his prosthetic limb.
