Milk Teeth (Short Film)
2022 marks the centenary of the boundary line drawn on the island of Ireland being recognised as an international border. Milk Teeth is a conversation between a father and son from the borderlands of Donegal about violence, trauma and the slipperiness of inherited memory in a post-conflict society, using archive film of the Troubles along with personal video archives.
Made as part of the Make Film History x BBC100 project for the BBC centenary.
Milk Teeth can seen here as part of a selection of 12 films from the project: https://canvas-story.bbcrewind.co.uk/makefilm/
or by the clicking the button below to watch on BBC iPlayer.
Kevin Smets, Lennart Soberon, Irene Gutiérrez-Torres and Silvia Almenara-Niebla. "Phantom pains: Brexit-era border cinema and the anxiety of the unseen." In Kinotopias: Film, Place and Belonging in a Bordered World, 87–116. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2026.
"Milk Teeth uses similar shots and signifiers to many other Troubles media, yet adopts a more playful and self-critical stance to the production and application of memory." (p. 106)
"By using split-screen compositions, the past is not put in service of the present, nor is the present defined by the past, but both are put on equal footing – connected yet distanced from each other." (p. 106)