Also at the Absolut Fringe (as Dublin's fringe festival is now known) are Polish company Wiczy Theatre with 'Emigrants'. According to the blurb, this is a 'cramped reality show with 1 camper van, 2 emigrants, and 11 spectators'.

'Down on Cow’s Lane you’ll see a battered Mercedes camper van sitting forlornly at the kerb. After you and 12 others cram into it, you’ll find two Polish migrant workers engaging in a faintly absurdist tragic-comedy. As you knock knees with them, the men, XX and AA, lurch from an existential debate about eating a can of dog-food to a boozy exchange of philosophies over a melancholy New Year’s drink. Based on Slawomir Mrozek’s famous 1974 play, this vivid play questions the motives of migration, from raw economic need to a much more nebulous yearning for freedom.' So they say.

That's at Cow's Lane from September 5 to 11, with two shows nightly at 17.30 and 19.30. Tickets here.

While immigration, diaspora and multicultural issues have been prominent in the theatre and fringe festivals in Dublin in recent years, it's not evident from the Fringe programme that this is the case this year. (Though it's not very evident from the programme what is happening in the festival, such is the enthusiasm for 'post-dramatic' forms and jargon.) In any case, there are two shows which, on the face of it, may be of interest here.

Edit Kaldor is certainly someone who has lived a migrant's life: an émigré from Budapest to New York, now living and working between Amsterdam and Brussels. She brings 'Point Blank' to the Fringe. Here's some information on it

'The definitive spy-ware performance - a voyeur's paradise. Kaldor invites the 19-year-old Nada to present her large collection of photographs - for years she has been observing people, taking 'spy-photos' of them, capturing their private moments. The core of Nada's interest is to trace the various life-strategies that people follow. Driven by curiosity, she becomes witness to a wide range of - at times excessive - human behavior. Together with the audience she autopsies the images, implications and patterns that emerge. She aims to get a comprehensive overview and reach the ultimate conclusion: the vision of a life worth pursuing.

'Edit Kaldor was born in Budapest. At the age of 13 she immigrated with her mother to the United States, where she lived for ten years. After receiving her degree in English and Theater at Barnard College (New York) and University College (London), she worked for 6 years with Peter Halasz (Squat theater/Love theater, New York), collaborating on numerous theater performances and filmscripts. She then enrolled at DasArts (the postgraduate performing arts center in Amsterdam), where she started making her own theatre pieces, which soon received international acclaim. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam and Brussels and makes theater performances that tend to integrate the use of digital media, like Or Press Escape (2002), New Game (2004), Drama (2005), Point Blank (2007). In the past years she has been invited to perform her work in about 30 countries around the world.'

(Runs September 5-8 at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 6pm. Tickets here.)

As Irish emigrants docked in New York in the mid 19th century, some of the men found themselves drafted immediately into the US army - not just during the Civil War of the 1860s, but during the earlier war with Mexico that coincided with the Great Famine, 1846-1848. One large group of these, apparently largely forgotten here, went on to have a significant impact on the war, and are well remembered in Mexico. These were a group of 500 or so defectors from the US army, who deserted in protest at their treatment by US officers. They formed the San Patricios Battallion, fighting at every major battle in the war, and were ultimately defeated at Churubusco. Following that defeat, 47 Irishmen were executed.
Irish writer Larry O’Loughlin has written a play about these men, '100 More Like These', and it is about to embark on a short tour to the Electric Picnic (in the Spoken Word tent, on Sunday) and then Clifden (September 10), Belmullet (September 11), Longford (September 12), and Blanchardstown (October 16). September 10-12 marks the 162nd anniversary of the executions.

O'Loughlin writes about the play's genesis here. There is some video of a schools workshop by the writer and actor here.

Mark Day has also made a documentary on the San Patricios: information here, and a YouTube clip here.

Venue details:
The Station House Theatre, Clifden, Galway, September 10th
Aras Inis Gluaire, Belmullet, Mayo, September 11th.
Backstage Theatre, Longford, September 12th.
Draoicht Arts Centre, Blanchardstown, October 16th.

I've just spent a somewhat bewildering, but enlightening hour on Current.com, the website of the tv network of Al Gore. In the wake of the 2004 US presidential election, Gore decided to set up an independent tv network to compete with the networks that dominate (and have dumbed-down) US news. As he subsequently explained: 'One of the main reasons why our political system has not been operating very well until this (the 2008) election is the deadening influence of the television medium as it has been operated' (from this speech at the Web 2.0 Summit last year).

Current TV was launched in 2005, and features a combination of user-generated content, driven to the TV network via its online sibling, Current.com, and in-house productions. All material is factual. Viewers/users can contribute both documentary segments (called 'pods') and ads (with the possibility of getting paid if their work airs on the network), and can organise and join groups to follow certain subjects online.

Though the diversity of media, programming strands, groups and ways of participating initially is at first a little confusing - with the venture having spawned its own lingo - there is clearly good content there, and the online platform is a dynamic and accessible one.

Current's News strand is here.

The news groups are here, with a short article on the groups here.

(I don't see a group devoted to migration/immigration issues - perhaps an opening there for America's Voice, or one of the US lobby groups, to tap the Current community.)

The network's in-house documentary strand is called Vanguard, and airs 30-minute programmes and shorter follow-up segments. There's a programme on migration from Mauritania to Europe here and a search list for material on migration here. And more on Vanguard here.

In Ireland, Current airs on Sky Channel 183.

Finally, the FAQ section will be invaluable to those, such as myself, outside of Current's target demographic (15-34) who therefore sometimes feel that these people are speaking a slightly different language. For example: 'Current pioneered the television industry's leading model of interactive viewer created content (VC2). Comprising roughly one-third of Current's on-air broadcast, this content is submitted via short-form, non-fiction video "pods". Viewer Created Ad Messages (VCAMs) are also open to viewers participation.'

Over the course of 70 days earlier this year, two young American filmmakers undertook a cross-continental road-trip covering 20,000 miles. Along the route, they sought out and interviewed a series of individuals with stories to tell. The filmmakers were Austin Lynch (son of director David Lynch) and Jason S, and the result, a series of more than a hundred short online videos, under the title of 'Interview Project', is being presented online by David Lynch. The videos are being released every three days, with each focussing on just one person.

In an introduction, David Lynch explains the rationale behind the project as being, simply, 'a chance to meet these people'. 'It's so fascinating to look and listen to people,' he says.

As an example, here's their interview with Jim Carter in New Mexico.

This project isn't about migration in the sense in which it's commonly covered here, though invariably some of the stories told in it deal with migration across the US. I stumbled upon it while researching the camera I used on location in Angola recently (see last week's report for more), the Sony PD 150, which was used by David Lynch to make the feature, 'Inland Empire'. (He discusses the making of the film here.) However, in its emphasis on the integrity and inherent drama of 'ordinary' people's own stories, and in its smart use of online video and distribution, I felt it echoed some aspects of our own work at FOMACS and might be illuminating for readers.

Interview Project is also on Facebook.

Your correspondent has just returned from a spell in Angola, where I was filming a documentary with seed funding from the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund of Irish Aid. One of the great themes of modern Angola history and politics is migration, and I wish to reflect briefly on this here in a special report.

In the first place, Angola was both the destination for Portuguese colonisers and the provider of a slave population exported wholesale during the 18th and 19th centuries. Angolan author Jose Eduardo Agualusa, now making waves in English-language literature thanks to belated translations of his novels, gives an elegant account of the final days of the slave trade in his epistolary novel, 'Creole'.

Angola was, of course, also a destination for missionaries - the Holy Ghost fathers (or Spiritans), who run some of Dublin's best-known private schools, maintain a strong presence there - and for colonial-era internationalist administrators and businessmen. Amongst them Roger Casement, who was British Consul in Angola from 1898 to 1900, from where he was redeployed to Congo, leading to his groundbreaking report on human rights abuses there under the rule of Belgium's King Leopold. (Casement would later be executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising.)

Portugal abandoned its colonies in Angola and Mozambique almost overnight in 1975, following a successful coup against the Salazar dictatorship, partly prompted by the army's frustration at the expenditure of men and money in the colonies. Fearing wholesale slaughter in the face of the rapid advance of three liberation armies, the Portuguese resident population also abandoned Angola: Ryszard Kapuscinski's 'Another Day of Life' has an unforgettable description of this exodus.

Amongst those I interviewed, one Angolan in the town of Kuito told how his father, a Portuguese settler, had left overnight in 1975, leaving his son (born to an Angolan woman, not the settler's wife, in one of the bairros) behind. They have never had contact since.

With independence, the country descended into civil war, from which it emerged briefly in 1992, to hold elections, which prompted a renewed and more ferocious war, and again, briefly, in 1994, and finally (and so far successfully) in 2002.

The most striking account of the country at war is Pedro Rosa Mendes's 'Bay of Tigers', an idiosyncratic account of this Portuguese journalist's journey across the country in the late 1990s. (I previously reviewed this, here; also available here.)

The war provoked huge population movements. The conflict moved hundreds of thousands of soldiers around the country, often leaving them abandoned in areas far from their homes when they were injured. Large numbers of Angolans sought refuge in Zambia in particular, largely associated with the UNITA movement. And hundreds of thousands were internally displaced. Some of these people resettled in peri-urban areas, particularly around the capital, Luanda (as documented by Development Workshop), which is now a hugely overburdened city whose bairros are apparently increasingly dangerous.

Others moved periodically, fleeing their villages as one army raided and returning when they could. In one village in Bié province, local elders told me how they had sometimes spent up to ten months living in the bush, seeking to avoid the bombardment and attacks of one or either armed forces, losing many of their community to sickness (such as malaria) or violence en route. And many sought refuge in temporary camps that arose around the inland towns such as Kuito and Huambo. In some of these sites that I visited, former camps have been formally converted into bairros, and the residents had replaced earlier hastily-built huts, often with roofs of plastic sheeting donated by aid agencies, with more sturdy and spacious (but still very poor) houses of adobe bricks and corrugated-iron roofs. In others, the camps were gone, the people returned to their places of origin (or absorbed into the towns), and markets had sprung up on the sites.

I worked in Angola in 2000-2001, and a large part of my motivation for returning, and filming, was to witness and document the free movement of people on the roads. During the war, most inland towns were effectively islands, with land travel between them both dangerous and logistically complex, due to appalling roads and lack of transport. Travelling across the country on private buses and taxis (both minibuses and jeeps - motorbike taxis are also very common, though hair-raising), I witnessed a population exhilaratingly on the move.

Though the country hugely lacks formal opportunities, Angolans are highly entrepreneurial and trade is thriving. On one journey, the women travelling in the taxi I was in (an overcrowded Hiace, which broke down half way to our destination) started discussing their trade: one had been to Dubai last year, taking advantage of the new direct flight from Luanda, to buy goods for resale in Angola, but said that Namibia was actually more cost effective. The main problem was cash: you could only bring $5000 into Dubai she said, and "$5000 is nothing for doing business". These are people who by Western standards could only be described as poor in opportunity and resources, with very limited access to such goods as formal education, employment opportunities, credit or home ownership, yet they by a constant routine of travelling and trading, bringing products to areas to which franchises and larger-scale traders have not yet penetrated, they leverage their limited resources to make small profits on very high turnovers.

But there was a yet more surprising aspect to the migrations that characterise Angola today. The town of Kuito in central Angola was long a proxy for the Angolan war itself: hugely war-damaged, ringed by vast camps of displaced people, and with a population who lived for the best part of a decade effectively besieged (there were two formal sieges of Kuito by UNITA during the 1990s, both successfully resisted, both at huge cost in lives, damage and trauma). Now, it is rapidly being rebuilt, and foremost amongst those both rebuilding, contributing and taking advantage of new opportunities are a great diversity of migrants.

There is huge Chinese investment in Angola - controversial, as in other countries in Africa, for the extent to which Chinese construction firms rely on their own, imported, labour, and for allegedly poor conditions for those workers (according to some sources, Chinese prison labour is common, with prisoners serving out their sentences in construction in Angola. In one private business in Kuito, I met an Angolan entrepreneur who had gone into partnership with a Chinese firm to run a small cement brick factory producing 2,600 bricks a day: the firm brought with it a staff of 12 labourers from China, apparently on five-year contracts. There were camps of Chinese, sometimes guarded by the military, dotted throughout the areas I passed through. It is commonly said that they do not mix greatly with the locals, though in Kuito there was tangible evidence that they do: as one young woman said to me, excitedly, "they've made [Angolan-Chinese] twins!" There are also Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans running shops and small businesses locally. (See these articles on BBC and New York Times for more on Angola-China links.)

The informal businesses of currency exchange (dollars for kwanza) and resale of mobile phone credit in Kuito are dominated by Congolese, amongst them some who are the Congo-born children of Angolan refugees or expats. These are reluctant to talk as (presumably) they are 'sans-papiers'; they complained of harassment by the local police.

Various people told me of 'Arab' businessmen and traders: I met young men from Khartoum who had rented a prominent shop space from a local and were importing various electro-domestic and household goods for retail.

There has been renewed migration from Portugal to Angola, with many of those who left in the 1970s, and/or their children, returning, and new immigrants seeking business opportunities, and this has been accompanied by extensive immigration from Brazil, whose government is reportedly notably sympathetic to Angola's.

Another group to return in numbers are the Cubans: Cuba was a notable supporter of the new Angolan state (run by the socialist MPLA) in its early years, which were characterised both by the war with the South Africa-backed-UNITA (Cuban military support was vital in the State's success in the 1988 battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the largest land battle in Africa since World War II), and with the attempted extension of the State, in which Cuban teachers and medics were notable. There are again large numbers of Cubans working in third level education and as doctors throughout the country. Other counties contributing such 'solidarity' workers include the Czech Republic and North Korea. International non-governmental organisations, amongst them the Irish charities Concern and Trócaire, retain a presence in the country, though it is greatly diminished since the end of the war, and less reliant on expatriate staff.

From my point of view, work now begins on the difficult task of selecting and editing footage, and seeking further funding to facilitate this. The eventual output will be a short documentary; however, ideally, an interim step would be to release short selections of footage online, either via a YouTube channel or a dedicated website, or even perhaps Facebook. The aim of this would be make the material more readily available, both to any interested in Angola (about which there is a great shortage of English-language media) and in particular to those who participated in the filming and their community. Internet rollout in Angola is proceeding apace, and all of the towns I was in have cyber cafés (though connections are erratic and bandwidth is even slower than that of Ireland).

Though traditionally Angolans have been guarded in their discussion of the war and politics, there is a new openness in the country following the successful elections of last year, which themselves followed four years of stable peace. I found people everywhere very willing to talk on camera about themselves and their country, and when I needed to film in public places (such as on buses), as soon as I described the nature of the project, people embraced it. Though there are huge problems (neglect of poor communities, corruption, incompetent administration and heavy-handed state centralisation are amongst them), there is a tangible sense in the inland towns that the country is staking a claim for recognition as a modernising nation, and they largely welcomed this outsider come to document that. I will post further updates as the project progresses.

The project is in part a collaboration with the South African photographer Guy Tillim, who has photographed Kuito extensively. There is a selection of his work here. The thumbnail above is taken from his series of portraits of displaced people in Kunhinga, outside Kuito town, in 2001.

As always, correspondence is welcome to migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org.

Colin Murphy