Short Profile: Desperate Optimists

Couple Joe Lawlor (1963) and Christine Molloy (1965) work together calling themselves desperate optimists. Hailing from Dublin, they have lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1987, making works for a variety of media and contexts including digital arts, video, film, radio and performance. From their first creative engagements twenty years ago with community theatre, and on into experimental performance and now short films, they have remained acutely aware of performance and narrative along with the seductive charge inherent in the various languages of cinema. They desire to ground their work in a feeling for lived, shared experience, place and purpose. Their awareness of civic space has increasingly underpinned their activities. Not only in setting, but also through the stories they tell.
Restless, humorous and edging towards violence, they express the complex feelings we have about public spaces in our cities culminating in their impressive series: Civic Life. In July 2003 they embarked on the Civic Lifeseries and have since then created a unique and richly cinematic series of short films that capture different places and communities in a single daring take. Each of the films was shot in a day, working with 35mm equipment, complex film rigs and environments, not to mention hundreds of extras. About their consequent use of long takes British film critic Chris Darke wrote: ‘It is possible that this use of the long-take represents a strategic choice. If so, it is an elegant one, successfully executed.’
Lawlor and Molloy have generated a body of work made in negotiation with local residents that is both theatrical and deeply cinematic, experimental and highly accessible.