M V Superficial, a few things about Murphy Village HD

After documenting and filming communities of Irish Travelers in the United Kingdom for sixteen years, I have decided to embark on continuing my work with communities in the United States of America with another photographer and film-maker, François Moura. The main reason why we are interested in documenting Irish Travelers in the USA is that not much documentary work has been done about them. So, in January 2018, we spent one week in Murphy Village, in Aiken County, South Carolina, near Augusta, the largest community of Irish Travelers - about 2,000 members- in the USA. In the late ’50s, Father Murphy, the priest in charge of the local doicese encouraged the Irish Travelers - all devoted Catholics - to buy some land and settle there. Murphy Village was born. We found a very reclusive community, fearing the “outside world” and being feared by it too, a community suffering from being discriminated but also being under a FBI and DSS investigation for child abuse - under age marriages - and different cases of frauds and scams. This situation didn’t make our work very easy: Members of Murphy Village were reluctant to talk to us but we managed to get some trust from them and decided to shoot and produce a short documentary about them: their everyday life, their traditions, their links with the “outside world” and the discrimination against them.