Pavee lackeen

Winnie is 10 years old and lives with her mother and several siblings in a caravan on the edge of the mill heaps in Dublin's industrial district. She bravely endures the everyday life of the family that has fallen out of society, with the search for water when they have once again been shooed off the site by the state authorities, visits from social workers who can't help either, and playing in the dirt with the younger siblings. Winnie goes to school, but she doesn't have many more prospects in life. She already looks like a "rubble woman" who has seen a lot of misery. But Winnie's courage to face life is unbroken. She is the daughter of drivers (the slang term for this is "Pavee") and has to get along in the given milieu. The actors in this moving social-realist story tell of their real lives on the borderline between documentary and feature film. Fashion photographer Perry Ogden shot for 10 months in the unfamiliar milieu with a digital mini-camera and developed his film scene by scene with the amateur actors. The film is reminiscent of early films of Italian neorealism and describes that there is still hope even in the caravan life at the bottom of the social ladder. (Festival information)