Margo Harkin and Anne Crilly are founding members of the radical film-making collective the Derry Film and Video Workshop (DFVW). Established in 1983 until 1990, DFVW was a women-led film production company formed under the terms of the 1982 Workshop Declaration, an initiative that sought to democratise the process of filmmaking and amplify marginalised voices. Its members, most of whom had no prior experience in filmmaking, came together with a sense of urgency to make films addressing political tensions around gender, class, the Irish national question and the legacies of colo– nialism. Films produced by the collective, such as Stop Strip Searching (1984) and Mother Ireland (1988), offered a nuanced depiction of these complex forces at work in the North of Ireland. DFVW sought to tell a different story about their lived political and social realities, and the intersection and fractures between feminism and repub– licanism were the key subjects. A powerful retrospective exhibition-project in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin this year showcased the history and work of DFVW. Titled ‘We realised the power of it’, it included raw footage, photographs and archival documents. Harkin (also the director of the critically acclaimed STOLEN documentary) and Crilly worked through the archive with curator Sara Greavu and artist Ciara Philips to preserve, digitise and archive the videotapes – that only existed in their original U-matic format – along- side working through an extensive document and image archive for the exhibition. Harkin and Crilly’s dedication to creating the exhibition and seminars around it has opened up an important era of Ireland’s history and the women who were part of it.
