The Movement of Violence, N.I. is an anthemic love letter to Northern Ireland. An experimental dance documentary investigating how violence lingers in the body, how memory shapes gesture, and how dance becomes an act of release, resilience, and restitution.
SYNOPSIS
Visual artist, Deirdre Lewis, and choreographer, Oona Doherty, collaborate on a visceral exploration of life growing up in Northern Ireland, blending shared memories of urban unrest and rural beauty through movement, dance, photography, and film.
A heaving rave, a bonfire blazes, a murmuration of bodies in sync. Two women throb atop a Bronze Age fort. A Black figure glides across an open hillside. Drummers march; hard shoes strike the floor. This raw, layered portrait of identity, tension, and release emerges as a short film and immersive multimedia installation, produced by Paradise Productions.
Unfolding as choreographed vignettes, fragments of memory, impression, and atmosphere, the film weaves the personal and political through reportage footage, Lewis's photographic archive, and newly staged cinematic sequences. It expresses the lived experience of a generation marked by sectarian violence and colonial brutality, yet also by the performative efforts of reconciliation that defined the post-Good Friday Agreement era.
Doherty's choreography gives physical form to these contradictions, where bodies become living archives, sometimes heavy with inherited trauma, sometimes breaking into ecstatic release. Costume design draws on the collections of Simone Rocha, layering Irish identity and material culture. DJ and musician Eamon Harkin weaves underground rave culture with traditional Irish folk music, amplifying the tension between rupture and communion. Fragmented, cyclical, sensorial, the film mirrors memory itself. Shifting between urban unrest and rural serenity, chaos and stillness, it is personal testimony and collective portrait, an anthem of survival and a testament to art's power to transmute trauma into beauty.
Director Statement
“As an artist, I approach this story from a place of both intimacy and distance. As a Black Irish woman, my ancestors on many sides hold colonization and oppression in their bodies. In the rave scene of the 2000s, I discovered a space of refuge, release, and belonging, a community where music and movement dissolved boundaries and where bodies could express freedom beyond politics or prejudice. These experiences anchor the emotional core of the film, allowing me to connect personal histories of displacement with Northern Ireland’s collective memory of unrest and resistance.”
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Director Deirdre Lewis
Deirdre Lewis is a Black Irish visual artist whose work centers on photography and explores identity, culture, and belonging. Born in Athens, raised in Derry, and now based in New York, her multicultural background deeply informs her visual language. A first-class honors graduate of Nottingham Trent University, Lewis began her practice through multimedia work combining sculpture and photography to examine race and representation. She approaches fashion as a cultural language and form of armor, an intersection of craft, knowledge, and self-expression and is known for her empathetic gaze that reveals deeper human truths. Her work has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar US, i-D, and Vogue Mexico, among others. This film marks her directorial debut, expanding her multidisciplinary approach into moving image and continuing her commitment to reimagining how identity is seen and celebrated.
Jill Ferraro is Executive Producer & Founder of Paradise Productions, a narrative + commercial production company based in New York City. Ferraro’s process thrives in the context of exploring non-traditional modes of storytelling, production, and curation within the creative industries of art, fashion and film. Recent projects include producing acclaimed artist Josh Kline’s narrative film, “Adaptation". The film had its premiere at the New York Film Festival (2022) and was a key part of Kline’s solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 2023) and Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, 2024). Ferraro produced "run", a special project for BAFTA Film Awards-winning director Savanah Leaf which had its world premiere at Hauser & Wirth (Los Angeles, 2023). "run" and "run002" showed at SFMoMA (San Francisco, 2024) and will be on display at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arizona, 2025) and Perez Art Museum (Miami, 2025). “Appliance”, another recent production with artist Olivia Erlanger, premiered at Erlanger’s solo show at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston (Houston, 2024) as well as showed at Luhring Augustine (New York, 2025). "God is Good" directed by celebrated multidisciplinary artist C Prinz is part of the Criterion Collection. Ferraro's commercial clients include Prada, Miu Miu, Versace, Chloe, ACNE, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Gucci, Tiffany & Co., Adidas and Nike. She has also released projects with Dazed & Confused, Document Journal, Vogue, The Face, anOther, Fader, Pitchfork, and New York Times' T-Magazine.
Oona Doherty is an acclaimed Belfast-based choreographer and dancer whose work blurs boundaries of genre, identity, and gender. Known for her raw, emotionally charged movement language, she explores themes of class, masculinity, and spirituality drawn from the streets and youth culture of Northern Ireland. A graduate of London Contemporary Dance School, the University of Ulster, and Trinity Laban, Doherty gained international acclaim with works such as Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus and Hard to Be Soft – A Belfast Prayer, which was named Best Dance Show by The Guardian in 2019. Her choreography has been presented at major cultural venues including Tate Britain and in collaborations such as Jamie xx’s music videos. In 2021, she received the Silver Lion Award for Dance at the Venice Biennale, cementing her reputation as one of Europe’s most vital and visionary choreographic voices. She continues to tour internationally with her latest work, Specky Clarke, a bold and deeply personal exploration of transformation, identity, and the power of movement to transcend the everyday.
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Women Make Movies (WMM), Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit media arts organization registered with the New York Charities Bureau of New York State and accepts charitable donations on behalf of this project. Your donation will be spent by the filmmaker(s) toward the production and completion of this media project. No services or goods are provided by Women Make Movies, the filmmaker(s) or anyone else associated with this project in exchange for your charitable donation.
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