Terms of endearment

When documentary-maker Hilary Dully was asked to run a course for women in Connemara which focused on media and gender, she ended up producing and directing a documentary with them. It has a simple, but effective format: three generations of Connemara women from three different families talk to camera about their relationships with each other, and their life experiences.

The course which prompted the documentary had been funded by New Opportunities for Women (NOW), and when it looked like turning into something with a potentially broad appeal, Dully approached Cathal Goan of what was then Telefis na Gaeilge. He provided additional funding and gave them technical assistance and encouragement. The result is Images of Ourselves, which airs tomorrow night.

Each of the three families speaks in turn about their views on marriage, love, religion, ambitions, and career. The grandmothers, all mothers of very large families, speak in retrospect; their daughters speak from a place where they are looking both forwards and backwards; and their daughters and nieces reflect on how different their own lives of freedom, college, and choices are from those of their grandmothers.

The documentary has the intimate feel of a home-movie to it. Some of the women peer uneasily at the camera lens, giving an occasional self-conscious giggle, their body language making it clear that they are unused to being captured on film like this; looking both honest and wary. It's got nothing to do with age, either, granny Eileen Keane is a complete natural on camera.

Talking of religion and Mass-going these days, one granny says: "The young people have a choice to think things out for themselves now. That is better." Another granny maintains: "Men had more respect for their wives and paid them more attention in our day."

And watch out for the formidable granny who sits in her kitchen and says, "The women now have no work. They don't have to work like we had to. We worked hard." Her accompanying sniff of derision for the idle women of today can probably be heard on the other side of the Atlantic.

It's the middle generation in this documentary which is perhaps the most interesting. "The most striking thing that comes out of the documentary is the way women's lives changed with contraception," comments Dully. "Family size had a huge impact on the lives of these women."

Granny Keane's daughter, also called Eileen, is remarkably frank about her experiences of growing up in a family of 10 children. "Having seen my mother's life as I was growing up, marriage and children just scared the life out of me," she confesses.

Eileen's own experience is the polar opposite of her mother's: she doesn't have any children yet, although it was hard not to conclude from her contributions that that she would like to.

Would she do anything differently now? Yes, she considered, she would. Like her siblings, she took the boat to England for a life in London. "I never even thought about it. I just did it," she says. If she could do things over, she wouldn't be so intimidated by her education in Kylemore Abbey, where at that time, it was not expected, she said, that day-girls would - or could afford to - go to college.

"A secretarial course would be considered a good career for me then," she admitted. What she regrets is not trying to pursue a career in singing. Appropriately, she gets to sing in this documentary; filmed in the chapel at Kylemore, and hopefully laying some old ghosts in the process.

What Mary O'Toole, also the middle generation, would change would be to wait a few years, maybe five, after getting married before she had children. "The first year I was married was the happiest of my life," she relates.

The granddaughters, Elaine King, Rosie Keane, and little Angela O'Malley speak of their lives so far at school and college. Big families have already been ruled out in their heads as a possibility. Elaine talks from her college campus about the opportunities she has which her grandmother never had, and considers herself lucky. But the grannies consider themselves lucky in other ways.

`WE had lots of time with our children," they say, recounting stories of picnics in the bog, and a local world which revolved around the distance they could walk, since there were no cars.

It's only at the end of the programme that we see the different families come together in the one scene. Granny Nora Ni Cheannabhain watches in the kitchen as her daughter, Mary Ann O'Malley dances round the house with her granddaughter, Angela. Another family goes out collecting turf together, and the connections to each other suddenly become tangible and real - and moving.

Images of Ourselves will be shown tomorrow at 10.20 p.m. on TG4