Sibyl Montague

Claí na Péiste (Worm's Ditch)

Through novel means, Claí na Péiste (Worm’s Ditch) engages with the ever-present consequences of British colonialism in Ireland, and how this history has shaped the country’s people, culture, industries, animals, and land. The animated film by Sibyl Montague combines hand-illustrated, CGI animation with puppetry. Set in the Irish landscape, it explores Irish cultural identity using folklore and song to reflect on inter-species relationships and human connections to animals as both product and kin. Using the lyrical form of storytelling in the tradition of the Seanchaí (bearer of old lore), the film’s narrative explores linguistics and cognitive dissonance around the loss of mother tongue, creating instances of slippage, mistranslation, and bursting into song. The narrative is told through the avatars of Pig (Muc) and Worm (Piste) and references early Irish legends that tell of journeys of growth and transformation. The characters shapeshift between timelines, or ‘wormholes’, that chronicle their bond to humans, channelling dualistic themes that display poverty, cruelty, spirituality, technology, and magic in the Irish landscape. Distilling an array of urgent socio-political issues into a cohesive narrative, Montague’s film addresses the complex history of colonialism in Ireland, linguistic and cultural genocide, and various forms of systemic violence wrought against Irish people, animals, and the land they both live on. The work is also underpinned by a need to generate new representations outside of an anthropocentric view of the environment by engaging with themes of biodiversity, speciesism, and borders as ideological constructs.