“Eat Your Children”, a new film about Ireland, austerity and dissent, which explores the role of the activist in society, will be screened at Dance Limerick as part of The Limerick Spring Festival of Politics and Ideas.
The Limerick Spring celebrates the role of the citizen in the political life of Limerick. The festival’s theme this year is “Citizen Activist – how the citizens of Limerick, Ireland and Europe can shape our own futures into 2015 and beyond”.
“Eat Your Children” is a provocation, an inside out activist film, that tries to document something that seems to be invisible. It is a road trip quest by two friends who emigrated from Ireland during the financial crash – now they have come back to find out why Ireland does not resist austerity in the way that people seem to do in the rest of Europe.
The film’s formal use of observational footage, street voxpop, archive material, metaphorical visual essay language mixed with on-the-road verite, makes for a rich and accessible tapestry of audiovisual material that immerses the viewer in the world of the protagonist-filmmakers, who are trying to understand identity, post-colonialism, nationalism, globalisation, resistance and the discontented in contemporary Ireland and Europe.
Ireland’s reaction to the banking crisis asks future generations to keep paying off a dead bank’s debt. Taking its title from Jonathan Swift’s 1729 “A Modest Proposal” that suggested Ireland eat its young as a solution to poverty, “Eat Your Children” continues in this satirical tradition to explore contemporary economic hardship, and the response and lack thereof, to unprecedented austerity measures.
Director, Writer, Producer: Treasa O’Brien
Co-Director & Writer: Mary Jane O’Leary
Stinging Hornet Films
