Three superb dramas focused on young women making new lives for themselves just after the Second World War. All were love stories, but so much more. Carol, a lesbian love story, set in New York, was about being true to oneself, and of finding oneself in committing to – and trusting in – others (NI December 2015). Brooklyn, the gentlest of the three, focused on an Irish woman, in the same city, at the same time, but with a sense of wider economic migration, and of the sacrifice as well as the possibilities (NI November 2015). Phoenix was a riveting story of a young woman’s overwhelming loss – of trust, love, friends, family – in post-War Berlin. It, too, caught the wider social context – collective abuse and trauma, guilt and longing – with force and profundity (NI May 2015).
As usual, it’s impossible to do justice to a year’s worth of recording gems in a few words. So to do the impossible: the crown this year goes to Checkpoint 303 for The Iqrit Files (KKV Records), reviewed in NI July/August 2015. Originally from Palestine and Tunisia, the CP303 collective has before used its skills to produce a masterful bricolage of beats, sounds and just darned good music to highlight the everyday cruelty of life under Occupation; in this album they home in on a single village as a concrete example of this. Brilliant.
