GO YE AFAR

Go Ye Afar (2026), follows the journey of an Irish-Nigerian taxi driver on a miraculous voyage through the streets of Dublin and Calabar. Written in collaboration with Beulah Ezeugo of the ‘Éireann and I Archive’, the film was inspired by our oral history interviews with Irish-Nigerian taxi drivers, Irish Missionaries and people who worked between Ireland and Nigeria. The film applies the storytelling structures of the voyage in Irish literature to the mythical journey of a transatlantic travelling taxi, a vehicle for bridging the recent histories of colonialism, Christianity, and charity connecting both states.

Go Ye Afar occupies the hazy space between fiction and documentary, memory and archive, magic and reality. The film mixes rear-projection driving imagery (as a Brechtian distancing device) with reenacted interviews, documentary and archival material to connect the use of media by missionaries in shaping the Irish understanding of the Nigerian–Biafran War (the first televised humanitarian disaster), to the foundation of many major NGOs in response to this conflict, to the legacies of colonialism in contemporary free trade and immigration systems.

Central to the film is an inquiry into the politics of movement and the way travelling has manifested in religious practice, from Biblical walking on water, to missionary evangelisation and The Motorists' Prayer. From global immigration patterns to daily movement around a city, Go Ye Afar attempts to question who gets to move, how we get there and at what cost.