Duffy, J., 2019.

The Lament

The Lament is an experimental documentary filmed entirely by drone that exposes the taboo sites of the Cillini in rural Ireland.

They are the traumatic sites of oppressive religious practice, the burial grounds of infants who died before baptism and were banished by the Catholic church from consecrated ground. The souls of the infants were assigned to wander limbo in perpetual purgatory and often buried in Iron age ring forts and cursed fairy forts in a practice that continued until the 1960s.

Within this film these harrowing spaces are explored using drones to create an emotive sense of place, an eerie encounter between worlds, the contemporary and the ancient, the world of the living and the world of limbo, of fairy lore and tragedy in a landscape embedded with sorrow.

The Lament