Reviewed - Pavee Lacken, The Traveller Girl: An award-winning docudrama looks deep into the life of a 10-year-old girl, writes Michael Dwyer

ON ITS world premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh in July, Pavee Lackeen - The Traveller Girl collected the audience award for best new Irish feature film, and it added to its trophies last week when it was given the Satyajit Ray Award for best first feature shown at the London Film Festival and the Ifta award for best Irish feature of 2005.

Directed by photographer Perry Ogden, who wrote it with Mark Venner, Pavee Lackeen defies easy classification in its blending of drama and documentary. The main parts are taken by an actual Traveller family, the Maughans, living in cramped conditions in a trailer parked near a building site and a noisy roundabout in a desolate area of Dublin. The cast includes some professional actors, most recognisably Michael Collins, who had a recurring role as a Traveller in Glenroe.

The focus of Ogden's intimate, observational film is on 10-year-old Winnie Maughan, whose slight figure strikes an engaging screen presence as the film follows her through her daily life. She is reprimanded at school for fighting "because they were calling me names", dresses up with her sister for a night out that involves eating chips by the side of the road, gets into trouble for petty theft, sniffs petrol fumes with other children, sources clothing from a recycling centre. Meanwhile, her mother, who bore 10 children, tries to avoid eviction.

Ogden cites Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados and Martin Bell's Streetwise as influences, along with Alan Clarke's uncompromising body of work. In terms of its realist form and social concerns, Pavee Lackeen also evokes Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home and Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's Rosetta.

Ogden's approach is affectionate and consistently unpatronising as his film challenges stereotypical images of the Traveller community. It notes the Third World conditions of the Maughans in prosperous present-day Ireland and draws us deep inside the world of Winnie and her family.

The warmest responses Winnie receives come from immigrants of various nationalities. They don't treat her with prejudice because, it is implied, they face enough of it in their own lives in a new country.