Trouble

Trouble begins in Vienna, with the filmmaker meeting her father, David, whom she hasn’t seen since she was two years old. On-screen text narrates Garnett’s internal state, and is juxtaposed against both sit-down interviews with David as well as casual, iPhone documentation of their burgeoning relationship. Eventually, he begins to tell her about his childhood, and where he came from – Belfast, Northern Ireland. She surprises him by showing him a BBC documentary that was made in 1971 about his interfaith relationship with a Catholic girl as a nineteen year old. They are cast as star-crossed lovers lost in a senseless conflict. He points out inaccuracies in that portrayal, which, he explains, led to threats from both Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups and his eventual flight from Ireland. After it aired, he cut all ties with friends and family and has never returned. The film then travels to Northern Ireland and segues into an impossible reconstruction of David’s early years in Belfast. Garnett travels there, and uses previously recorded audio interviews with David to skillfully craft a lip-synced, cross-gender performance where she impersonates the youthful presence of her father and casts a transgender actress in the role of his girlfriend. The film cycles through various camera modes – narrative vignettes shot on a RED alongside verité style camcorder footage mixed with these verbatim re-enactments – to create a fragmented account of a teenager struggling to find an identity in a rapidly deteriorating society. The layers of texture in this film mirror the fractured lens of history, and point to the impossibility of filmmaking as a container for "Truth." In Trouble, it is a means of connection between an estranged parent and his adult child, a medium for drawing connections between political struggles and a way to highlight the complexities of representation and the construction of identity.The project at large has received ongoing support from The Guggenheim Foundation, PRIME Collective, Digital Arts Studio, The Rema Hort Mann grant, The Sarah Jacobson Film Grant, The California Community Foundation grant and was a partial commission by The MAC Belfast and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.