"Paradise"

From the first sequence taken from a moving train, 'Paradise' asks the viewer to go on a journey. The signpost names the destination as the newly opened, thoroughly 'modern' "Bognar Regis Holiday Camp" South East England, circa 1960s This filmic montage of spliced home movie sequences is reconfigured through editing, inter titles, floating texts and a multiple layered sound track of song and dialogue. This film refocuses childhood and family memories by drawing on popular views from social science and 1950s anthropological theory (advocated by the American Margaret Mead). From the onset the film is constructed to hold the viewers attention. Using punchy fast paced dialogue and dynamic rhythm and authoritative documentary voice overs. These elements are complexly woven together using multiple first and third person narrations and the intense colouring of 8mm film especially its distinctive blues and reds. There are playful juxtapositions between an examination of identity construction in a modern idiom and the emergence of early 1960s British and American style leisure commodification as new sites of memory. Ultimately this film playfully suggests alternative readings of Paradise through an Irish immigrant family's archive of home movies.