“You know how history affects things? But it’s probably not the history… it’s, you know… the problems after hard times… without the history being there…”

Margaret (Back Translation) is a film which suggests how difficult it is to identify how, precisely, history informs our present – even when that history seems inescapable. Weaving together staged scenes, documentary elements and archival footage, the film explores the recent history of Belfast through a series of tonally diverse scenes, by turns comic, elegiac and speculative.

In 2001 an artist called Heather Allen gave an extraordinary performance in Belfast entitled KLub. Her performance commemorated Margaret Wright, whose brutal murder took place in the city in 1994, the last (official) year of The Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The artist Saskia Holmkvist undertook an idiosyncratic investigation into Allen’s performance and its context. She started from the idea of “back translation”: in translation terminology, the act of retranslating a text back again into its source language, in order to check it against the original. Holmkvist’s film undertakes to “back translate” Allen’s performance, via Holmkvist’s own experience of post-Troubles Northern Ireland and its contemporary artistic community. In the film’s translation of past to present, a younger generation of women reflect on and re-perform a history they have only heard told.

In the process, however, Margaret (Back Translation) explores how we can never simply return to, or recover, an “original” context. Somehow the film’s real subject itself remains fugitive, always just out of shot. Instead the film constructs its delicate narrative from absences, halting conversations, memories of secondhand experience, people who never quite appear from behind half-open doors…

Mike Sperlinger