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Seaview
Directed by Paul Rowley and Nicky Gogan
* NY Premiere *
82 min - 2007 - Ireland - English - Color
An hour north of Dublin beside the
sea is a bizarre looking collection of grey cement buildings
with brightly painted doors, and rusting fairground rides.
This is Mosney - Ireland’s Coney Island. A former Butlin’s
holiday camp, Mosney was once a world fully equipped for entertainment,
with arcades, fairground rides, holiday chalets. It was a
place where Irish families would escape the daily grind of
work in order to relax, to dance, enjoy themselves.
A visit to Mosney today presents
a radically different picture, but still a picture of escape.
This former holiday camp is now a camp of another kind, a
holding center for asylum seekers from all corners of the
globe. Here new residents wait years for the results of their
asylum claims.
Over three years, the filmmakers
lived in Mosney, gaining the trust of the residents. Intensely
close conversations reveal their individual stories, from
the epic to the everyday. From Congo, Kurdistan, Nigeria,
Somalia, Sri Lanka, we hear why people are forced to leave
everything they have and move to a country where they are
total strangers. And we learn of the trauma of waiting –
living in fear in this bizarre no-mans-land.
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