Matilda Wolfe-Tone died in Washington in 1849 having outlived two husbands and all her children. She had had an eventful life, eloping with Theobald Wolfe-Tone at the age of 16, spending 20 years fending for herself in Napoleonic Paris, and ending her days as head of a household of three generations of Irish-Americans.
‘The film opens on her overgrown, illegible tombstone in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn. Dug out of the ground, the stone is driven to the
restoration workshop upstate. As the sculptor cleans the stone, Matilda’s skeleton history emerges from its eroded surface – birth, marriages, death. The soundtrack is structured around story-telling & music; the primary source, Matilda’s own letters, being complemented by other accounts of her time, and punctuated by songs of the period.’ – Moira Tierney.
(2003, 25mins) (tbc)