Dear Daughter – Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist
Our second IFI Filmmaker Playlist is curated by filmmaker and visual artist Trish McAdam. Since the production of her early shorts in the 1980s, Trish has created a vibrant and varied body of work, embracing a range of forms and subjects and retaining a singular, independent voice. We’re delighted to welcome Trish to the Irish Film Institute to select her top picks from films preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive and presented on the IFI Archive Player. To view the other selections from Trish’s Filmmaker Playlist, click here.
Dear Daughter was the first televised exposure of the horrific abuse of hundreds of children in Ireland’s industrial schools. It exposed the cruelty and abuse happening in Dublin’s Goldenbridge Industrial School (a.k.a. St. Vincent’s Orphanage). In this drama-documentary film, Christine Buckley bravely recounts the extent of the atrocities she experienced as a child in Goldenbridge.
Born in London, she was the daughter of a married, long-separated Longford-born woman and a Nigerian medical student, at Trinity College Dublin. At the age of three weeks old she was given up for temporary fostering. Dear Daughter delves into her traumatic childhood at the orphanage and her persistent determination to find her parents.
Dear Daughter was one of several television documentaries (including Lentin’s Stolen Lives (1999) and Mary Rafferty’s States of Fear (1999)) which heightened public awareness of institutional abuse, and lead to the official Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (2000-2009). The film was awarded the Creative Excellence Award at the US International Film and TV Festival 1996, also was nominated for Best Social and Political Documentary, Banff Television Festival, 1996. It was also included in the final short-list for recognition in UNESCO Memory of the World (2025), a programme established in 1992 which safeguards humanity’s valuable documentary heritage, including film of international as well as local significance.
This documentary is part of The Louis Lentin Collection. View the full collection here.
With kind permission of Dr. Ronit Lentin.
