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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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