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Photographer Perry Ogden makes his directorial debut with Pavee Lackeen (The Traveller Girl), an unsparing - and unsentimental - portrait of Ireland's marginalised traveller community. Casting conventional plotting aside, the film follows suspended schoolgirl Winnie (Winnie Maughan), who lives with her alcoholic mother (Rose Maughan) and myriad siblings by the side of the road in an industrial Dublin wasteland. Without leaping on a soapbox, Ogden captures a stark sense of the poverty and prejudices his subjects face on a daily basis.

It's often hard to believe we're not watching a documentary. Playing characters close to their own, the mostly non-professional cast give bracingly unaffected performances, especially young Winnie. Suspended for playground fisticuffs, she roams the streets for a week, browsing the high street, fetching water and sniffing the occasional solvent. What emerges is not a stereotypical sketch of wayward youth but a more rounded, convincing image of human spirit uncrushed by oppressive circumstance. Winnie may not know when her birthday is, but she's impressively resourceful and, like 10-year-olds the world over, endlessly inquisitive.

"A GRIM TALE"

While Winnie wanders the city, the local authorities lean on her mother to move the family's trailer to what turns out to be an even dodgier area, without running water. It's a grim tale, but Ogden doesn't try to grind the viewer down. He blames the bureaucrats without turning them into cartoon baddies. He gives the disenfranchised a resilient voice without making a song and dance about it. In the end, the film's understatement is all but overwhelming.