Derry Film and Video Workshop (DFVW)
Derry Film and Video Workshop (DFVW) was a woman-led film production company established in Derry in 1983 that operated until 1990. Its members, most of whom had no prior experience of filmmaking, came together with a sense of urgency to make films addressing overlapping political tensions around gender, class, the Irish national question and legacies of colonialism. They sought to counteract the epistemic violence of depictions of the north of Ireland, its conflict, and its people by British TV news and cinema, telling a different story about their lived political and social realities.
DFVW produced a number of films, including Stop Strip Searching (1984); Planning (1986); Mother Ireland (1988); Hush-a-Bye Baby (1990), as well as enacting various forms of cultural education including community screenings and filmmaking courses. Working to counteract the ‘slow violence’ of British TV news and cinema stereotyped depictions of the north of Ireland, members of DFVW sought to tell a different story about their lived political and social realities.
In addition to their filmmaking activities, the DFVW had strong community links and provided filmmaking training for young people, a video library of tapes relevant to their interests, and public screenings of films that inspired them.
Critical Response: Strip Searching – Security or Subjugation? – Isobel Harbison (Goldsmiths, University of London)
In 1984, newly funded by the Channel 4’s workshop scheme, the Derry Film and Video Workshop completed their first documentary Strip Searching – Security or Subjugation (later titled Stop Strip Searching). Initially shown in a variety of contexts, it was invited to be screened to a sub-committee of the European Parliament in 1986. Directed by Anne Crilly, this film challenged the systematic strip-searching of republican women held in Armagh Gaol under British occupation. The issue of strip-searching had intensified debates about the intersection of struggles for national liberation and women’s liberation in the north of Ireland.
For DFVW’s first film, they taught themselves the technicalities of filmmaking to platform this urgent issue. Crilly and the DFVW interviewed ex-prisoners inside or outside their homes about the experiences, editing in drawings and staged photographs to represent invasive, unsupervised, and largely undocumented searches on women of all ages, even when pregnant. Additionally, they interviewed a law professor, psychiatrist, priest, journalist, and trade unionist on this subject.
This paper will consider this work in its political and production contexts, and how variously the DFVW’s filmmaking posed questions about gender and nation in an internationalist framework, appealing to audiences in and (as importantly) beyond Ireland and Britain.