New York Film Festival 2015: Why 'Brooklyn's' Immigration Story Is Universal
Immigration is one of the most sought-after topics currently being debated in the political landscape on a global scale. It is also the subject of "Brooklyn," the latest film by John Crowley. The movie is premiering at the New York Film Festival and scoring rave reviews.
The new film tells the story of a young girl who moves from Ireland to Brooklyn in search of a better life. The film brings back elements and nostalgia to the 1950s when immigration from Ireland was in vogue. However, the story is contemporary and while it deals with the life of an Irish girl, the theme of homesickness is universal among most immigrants who move from their countries in search of a better world.
Actress Saoirse Ronan spoke about her own struggles with moving away from home at the press conference and how she really shared many of the same emotions as her character Eilis Lacey does in the movie. "It was another a year before we actually shot the film. And in that time I actually made the move. So when I went back to the script again, I felt like everything between Colm (Toibin)'s writing and Nick (Hornby)'s amazing screenplay had just like really conveyed on a completely different level. It meant something much more to me over the course of the year."
She added, "The story really kind of spoke to me. So I just remember kind of asking you (John Crowley) about your experience about moving away and I was kind of in that mindset anyway and I think from then on it felt like it was kind of set and stone."
Ronan also noted that immigrating changes the perspective of your life. When Eilis returns to Ireland, she realizes that she is unable to see the world in the same way and while she copes for a while it never feels the same for her.
Ronan added, "It's not even the act of leaving or the physical act of like moving away from home. But it's more the realization that you get when you've left that you can't go back to how it was ever again. This sort of grief, this sort of grief starts to set in. ... And homesickness is that stays with you for a while until its passed on to someone else and you don't know when that's going to be. ... And I thinks kind of the scariest thing when you have that heaviness that you feel. ... But I was still in that state when we did the film. It was an incredibly vulnerable place to be."
Crowley added that "when you leave home it's a sort of wound that won't heal that easily. You sort of have to live with it."
While the movie is being released in time for the Oscars, it also comes out at a time when a migration crisis is dominating Europe and immigration is the most heated topic in the upcoming U.S. elections. Crowley notes the film may be about one girl but the character can be identified by many as Ronan pointed out in her experience.
"It's a tricky one because in many ways this is a small story but it has scale. But it suggests a lot more than one woman's actual journey. It's also rather internal and it does not rely on melodrama or large dramatic events to keep it moving forward. When you look at the contemporary migrant crisis to be honest the closest parallel would be family migration, which is a very very different thing but that has its shocking parallels. But it's a story which at its best humanizes the idea of migrants."