Lewes Film Club - Pavee Lackeen: The Traveller Girl

Former fashion photographer Perry Ogden made his directorial debut with the 2005 drama-documentary, The Traveller Girl, about a marginalised Irish traveller community who live on the outskirts of Dublin. Produced, shot and directed for a mere £200,000 the film went on to pick up the Irish film and TV award for Best Film. Dispensing with conventional plot narratives, it follows the life of 10-year-old Winnie Maughan and her extensive family. (She shares her caravan home with nine siblings and her chain-smoking mother who is raging an unsuccessful war against the Council’s plans to re-house the family in a rough district several miles away). The week-in-the-life begins with Winnie’s suspension from school and follows her subsequent aimless drifting from boredom to shop-lifting to solvent abuse. Elsewhere we are witness to a series of snapshot interactions with the local community - the social worker who is employed by the school to find out about Winnie’s home-life and the shop-keeper who treats her to a short lesson in Hindu theology.

Like the rest of the cast, Maughan is a non-professional actor drawn from within the same community that she is portraying, so that the lines between fact and fiction are not so much blurred as non-existent. But neither is there a conventional documentary agenda. Instead Ogden gives us a slice of the difficult lives of this community without comment or analysis and trusts for it to speak for itself. ER