ICS Lunchtime Seminar Series April 2013

This doctoral project consists of a fifty-minute documentary, Secret family recipes, and an exegesis. These explore a personal experience of migration and document issues of personal identity within broader family, community, and intercultural contexts. Secret family recipes is a documentary film that explores a personal connection to Ireland and to family and culture. It is a journey to the heart of one person’s Irishness. The documentary uses the device of cake baking to provide a narrative spine for the journey of exploration. The filmmaker, Enda Murray, journeys from Sydney back to his birthplace in Ireland in 2007 and helps his elderly mother bake her annual Christmas cake. In the course of this journey, he talks to his peers about their memories of growing up and ponders on his own early family life in Ireland. He then returns to Australia and bakes a cake with his two daughters (ages six and four), using this occasion to reflect on his current family situation. The exegesis provides a basic grounding in Irish-Australian history and culture. It explores the author’s previous work and draws on a range of literature to critique the production of Secret family recipes against the context of Irish documentary, Irish migrant documentary, and Irish Australian accented cinema.