Director Perry Ogden is best known as a photographer. This film grew out of a book he did called Pony Kids in 1999 that looked at Irish Traveller children caught up in the juvenile court system. Paveen Lackeen means The Traveller Girl in Cant, the language of the Travellers (also called Tinkers or Gypsies), which is a combination of Irish (Gaelic), English, and invented slang. Ogden is after a social realist drama in the realm of the work by Ken Loach and The Dardenne Brothers. The film has an obvious link to Alan Clarke’s Christine with shades of Sweet Sixteen/Kes(Loach) and Rosetta (The Dardennes). There’s a long history in cinema of stories about street kids from Bunuel’s Los Olivados, to the Brazilian classic Pixote, to Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay, to the recent U.S. indie Chop Shopby Ramin Bahrani. Ogden also points to the U.S. documentary Streetwiseas being an influence. The loosely held plot is quite simple. Winnie Maughan is ten years old, living with her Mother and some of her nine brothers and sisters in several ramshackle campers on the outskirts of Dublin. They have no running water, and pick clothes out of charity bins. Overwhelmed by her situation, Winnie’s Mom Rose (whose in her early forties but looks more like sixties) has an alcohol problem, and is getting nowhere in her attempts to secure a home and a place in a “settled” school for her kids. This low tech affair (Ogden shot this himself on handheld video) won several awards at international film festivals. Though meandering, one is inclined to respect Ogden’s fidelity in creating pure cinema. It adds an extra element when realized that although there are fictional elements and actors added into the mix, Winnie and Rose and the rest of the family (they use their real names) are playing close versions of themselves, and are actually living in those appalling circumstances - conditions similar to those we see about the poor in the mountains of Appalachia. There are some forty thousand Traveller people in Ireland, who exist largely as an underclass with the problems of illiteracy and lack of jobs being perpetuated from generation to generation. They are thought of as pariahs, a stigma contributing to their inability to advance. Be forewarned - the heavy accents are very difficult to understand and one has to simply pick up what one can (there are unfortunately no subtitles on this DVD release).

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