Margaret (Back Translation)

Behind the title and film, Margaret (Back Translation), lies a performance event by artist Heather Allen who gave a spoken-word event performance in Belfast entitled KLub from 2001. Her performance commemorated Margaret Wright, whose brutal murder took place in a bar in 1994, the last (official) year of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Holmkvist's film undertakes to "back translate" Allen's performance, via Holmkvist's own experience of post-Troubles Northern Ireland from a distance and its contemporary artistic community. In the process, however, Margaret (Back Translation), explores how we can never simply return to, or recover, an "original" context. The film's real subject itself remains fugitive, always just out of shot. Instead the film constructs its narrative from absences, halting conversations, memories of secondhand experience, people who never quite appear from behind half-open doors. The film, Margaret (Back Translation), suggests how difficult it is to identify how, precisely, history informs our present – even when that history seems inescapable. The entire process becomes a quest for connection with a place marked by a tumultuous history.