THERE is no doubt that Treasa O’Brien is that rare and precious thing, an activist film-maker.

Her film Town of Strangers, the product of four years of filming and editing, and then returning to film more material, is a collaboration with migrants who find themselves marooned in the small town of Gort in the west of Ireland.

“I’m putting it up to people,” says O’Brien. “These are the people in all of your towns.

“And I really want to show it in Ireland right now because there is a huge backlash, with protests going on outside direct provision centres. Is this even in the news in the UK?”

There are the 47 detention centres spread throughout Ireland, for those who apply for international protection.

The past few days have seen organised intimidation of those they accommodate.

And while it is a huge story in Ireland, the only coverage of this xenophobic upsurge has been in the Morning Star.

“The sense of welcome in Ireland has been countered by ’You’re taking our jobs, our homes and our welfare’,” she says.

“It’s divide and rule the working class, a cause taken up by populist nationalists — the new National Party — who plant the idea, and target neighbourhoods to rouse up anger towards migrants. This is a really difficult time and society has become divisive…

“I hope my film has a role to play in this. That people, by watching it will change their minds in some way…”

Her previous film, Eat Your Children, took Jonathan Swift’s idea that cannibalism would solve poverty in Ireland, and applied it to the present day: the cost to future generations of using public funds to bail out bankers.

“I thought the film would start a revolution,” she says. The film featured interviews with activists and ended up asking itself where is the protest?

“Lots of lefty activists saw it but they weren’t the audience. They were the content of the film!”

And while the drive towards political engagement informs all her work, she has adopted another strategy with the new film.

“I was deliberately going for something more psychological and emotional. The film before was more intellectual, on the nose, statistics, let’s change things … and I wanted to do something that would touch people on a more human level. So they feel something that isn’t voyeuristic, but also in themselves…”

To achieve this she set up public auditions in Gort because it has the highest proportion of foreigners of any town in Ireland, looking for anyone who wanted to be in a film.

She asked them for “dreams, lies, memories and gossip” because “these are neither fact nor fiction but the stories we tell ourselves and each other. They are ways of understanding ourselves that tap into a personal and collective unconscious. This is an area that cinema is very well suited to…”

O’Brien sums it up this way: “I’m looking more for truth than fact,” as though there is a human truth that we all carry with us, but rarely or never observe.

“Yes, it’s Ireland, but this could be a small town in the north of England or France…”

The film re-enacts her experiment using herself as a character, lingering in moments of uncertainty and drawing out a poetic resonance, and this is the formula she also applies to all her auditionees. They introduce themselves, and, over time, disclose a wish or a willingness to enact something for the camera.

“I wanted it to be a collective film where everyone tells a little bit of the same story…”

It is a high risk strategy: it risks being incoherent, and it risks becoming a spectacle that exploits marginal and vulnerable people.

“I am deliberately not being a therapist,” she says. “I show where I stop, and you can see the relationship.”

And she counters the danger of incoherence with the ambitious assertion that we all share common characteristics with her subjects. 

She is interested in people with “hybrid culture” — “I was trying to find in the specific stories of each person this universal feeling of longing and belonging. Longing for your other culture and trying to belong in this one.”

Because many of the characters are female this often manifests as a study of broken mother/daughter relationships, and how such a relationship lives on after separation and in a way that is stifling and ritualised as well as infantilising.

“I wasn’t looking for that,” says O’Brien. “In a way, that’s the unconscious of the film that I wasn't expecting and found in the edit.”

Two such women visit an empty house together on an undisclosed mission. Do they imagine the house could be theirs?

The scene carries a flirtatious and erotic undercurrent that the film observes, but cannot resolve.

“I deliberately resist solutions,” she says. “I try to show how people feel and what their lives are like. A moment in time. Not the full story…”

In another scene a Syrian couple have a child to whom they relate the story of their escape to Greece from Turkey by rubber boat, but the child doesn’t seem to want to hear the story at all, and you can see why.

These strange discomforts are signposts toward truths and destinies that lie beyond the timeframe of the film itself and it is through the arrangement of such “truthful,” but ambiguous and polyvalent moments that O’Brien aims to create a vehicle for compassion and empathy that can be widely experienced.

One character has an odyssey behind him. He fled Afghanistan for Iran and then Turkey. 

He crossed by boat into Greece and made his way to the Jungle in Calais before illegally entering Britain and then Ireland where he was finally granted refugee status. But you don’t learn that from the film.

Rather, you meet a character who frankly discloses suicidal thoughts and enacts a painful scene of self-punishment, before a long and telling final sequence that follows him jogging on a country road to leave him stranded and solitary on top of a rock.

He is isolated and alienated but you feel you know him, without being able to help. Are these feelings that we share with him?

It is on the high wire of such invited empathy that that O’Brien is trying to create a new language of cinema that is both strong-minded and delicate, both political and compassionate.

And given today’s Ireland, with its resurgent far right, you can only root for the success of this remarkable and creative ambition.

Town of Strangers opens in selected cinemas across the UK on February 10 2023. Distributed in the UK by New Wave Films. On Release in Ireland via on IFI@Home cinema. Tickets (includes bonus Q&A): www.ifihome.ie/film/town-of-strangers.