Once, Myrid Carten’s alcoholic mother Nuala disappears for two weeks. The daughter recognises her, curled-up in the middle of the Belfast pedestrian zone, by her shoes: the only street-drinker in high heels. She does not know what to do, keeps the camera rolling for a few minutes and leaves. How do you behave towards a mother who needs mothering herself? Carten tackles the question by making a film about it – as an intervention, exorcism, declaration of love, manifest of powerlessness.
Nuala is the centre of a complex, fragile family dynamic that revolves around the run-down family home where the camera obsessively crawls upside down along the walls again and again. The material is haunted in myriad other ways: scattered traces of past art projects, nerve-racking phone recordings and faded television images stand next to childhood memories on MiniDV cassettes that diffuse almost seamlessly into the present. At one point the mother’s voice even seems to take complete control of her daughter. Carten’s creative exuberance is enormously compelling, kept together by a fluid montage that lays bare the deeply sincere emotional core of the film.

Before photography and film were invented and constructed the “Wild West”, the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis, whose travels made the westwards expansion of the still young USA possible, died under mysterious circumstances. The present-day narrator of this film, a distant descendant, portrays him as the tragic hero of a speculative gay love story. The potential lover, Meriwether’s “Louisiana Creole” servant John Pernia, is historically documented. But the archive material, which favoured the white folklore of the so-called age of pioneers, lays no trail to this romance.

Ben Young wilds the early Western imagery and queers the nationalist historiography from the perspective of people who are missing in the tales of glory and whose originally free space was occupied by the settler movement and its subsequent legend formation. He uses associative montage and gossip to rehabilitate John and Meriwether, the undocumented romantic couple, as the real pioneers. And they have a score to settle with the U.S.

“Sex does strange things to people!” This sentence reverberates from her childhood. What did her mother mean? What fears did she pass on to Emma? The budding filmmaker sets up the camera in her mother’s apartment, invites mum’s friends, creates an open atmosphere. Coby opens up more and more, talks about a repressed topic. At the same time, she gets to show a wholly different side of herself, performing song and dance numbers in front of her daughter’s lens.

An inventive examination of the legacy of the 1990s: In his experimental short film, Ben Young portrays the figure of the then U.S. president – whom he is said to have met once in person in Louisville, Kentucky – as a foil for the questionable political developments, the beginnings of a globalised world and a society marked by collective amnesia. The director’s intelligent, witty and very personal reckoning with Bill Clinton.