A Line Was Drawn weaves together animated sequences, television archive footage, and two distinct voice-over narrations to explore how borders and boundaries structure our world, limiting movement, thought, questioning, and agency. Central to the maintenance of these divisions is the control of the narratives that surround them.
Through its layered form and contrasting sound sources, A Line Was Drawn interrogates the constructed authority of television documentaries and news broadcasts, whose seamless narratives are often tasked with advancing or reinforcing particular points of view. The film reflects on the individual's need to be heard within the constraints of storytelling conventions and dominant historical narratives.
Drawing on archival records of goods smuggled during the early implementation of the Irish customs border in the 1920s, the film traces echoes between the past and the present. These historical accounts resonate with renewed debates surrounding borders and the movement of goods following Brexit in the United Kingdom, revealing how questions of division, governance, and belonging continue to shape everyday life.
Underlying the film is an exploration of relationships between bodies and borders: the human body and the land, land and sea, language and its constituent words, the performer and her actions, and the collective bodies that make films alongside the political structures that erect partitions as instruments of control.
Produced with support from The Wapping Project, London; the Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Uist Film; and Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, North Uist, A Line Was Drawn premiered in the Experimenta programme of the 63rd BFI London Film Festival (2019).