A series of films by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor.

• Who Killed Brown Owl?
• Moore Street
• Town Hall
• Twilight
• Leisure Centre
• Now We Are All Grown Up

Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor are a Dublin-born, London-based writing/directing team. Working under the title ‘Desperate Optimists’ the pair began as a theatre company in 1992 but later diversifi ed into making works for a variety of media and contexts including fi lm, video, the internet, radio and galleries.

Staying true to their community theatre roots they began work in 2003 on ‘Civic Life’, a series of fi lms that explored the connections between community and environment. Employing a strict set of rules, each fi lm was shot on 35mm cinemascope, utilising single-take tracking shots of various degrees of complexity and featuring people from local communities to produce a body of work that is both theatrical and richly cinematic. The ‘Civic Life’ short ‘Who Killed

Brown Owl?’ took the award for Best British Short Film at the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival. ‘Desperate Optimists’ embarked on the ‘Civic Life’ series in July 2003 with the desire to create a unique and richly cinematic series of short fi lms made in negotiation with local residents and community groups and foregrounding the relationship these local communities have to the environments in which they live and work.