FOR THE RECORD

For The Record
54 mins / digital video / 2008 ©

For The Record is a conversation between a daughter and her father. It begins with a personal search and opens onto the wider history of detention without trial in Northern Ireland, asking what happens when political unrest allows the state to imprison people without charge or explanation.

The film centres on Mairéad McClean’s attempt to obtain her father’s official records, which had been closed to the public for forty years. Through these documents she hopes to understand why PJ McClean was imprisoned for four years, from 1956 to 1960.

During the making of the film, private and public records are uncovered and examined for clues. Testimonies are given, memories recalled, photographs studied and paths followed back to the prison that held many men during that period. The film draws the viewer into the intimate space of personal testimony, where the close-up camera blurs the boundary between interviewer and daughter, interviewee and father.

Is there ever a right time to discuss contentious histories? What can be gained by remembering? Can a wrong be righted in the act of recall?

For The Record seeks to remember what has been left unrecorded, unseen or misrepresented in public accounts of Northern Irish history. Personal memory, placed alongside closed public records, becomes a way of asking what truth can still emerge from the archive.

“Remembrance and commemoration are difficult peace-making strategies and memories of the conflict can be obstacles to successful post-violence adjustments; nonetheless memory must become an object of public policy after communal violence.”
— John D. Brewer, Memory, Truth and Victimhood in Post-Trauma Societies

PJ McClean, born in 1933, was a Northern Irish schoolteacher and political activist. He was chairperson of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1970s and was interned both in the 1950s and in Long Kesh in 1971.

*Mairead McClean (born 1966) is a filmmaker and artist.  This is her first documentary feature.

SCREENINGS/EXHIBITIONS:

For the Record (54mins/HDV/Col, UK, 2009) a documentary feature, funded under the AHRC Research Leave Scheme on the subject of Internment without trial.

Belfast International Film Festival | April 2009

Memory, Media, Global Formations Conference, The University of Greenwich | 2009

The Void Art Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland | 2009

The 15th International Symposium of Electronic Arts | (ISEA) | August 2009

Omagh Arts Centre Centre, The Doohneen Cultural Centre, The Dublin Progressive Film Club, among others from 2010 to 2014.

In 2019 the film was screened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art | Art and Politics | Summer School. Fellow participants included, Marina Gržinić, Ricard Noble, Prof Antony Downey and John Gerard.