Shrine
'Shrine' is based on a true story about my grandmother and is about a woman, Lillian, who put a shrine to St Mary Magdalene in a wood after the death of her mother in the late 1940s. The Department of Transport are now planning to build a new motorway which will run straight through the wood and the site where her statue now stands.
The film looks at how the destruction of her shrine marks the destruction of the whole imaginary world she has created in the woods over her lifetime, her place to walk, dream, remember. It follows her walking through the woods to the shrine on the day it is to be removed by the authorities. As she walks she relives the day she first put the statue up when she was twelve, pushing it into the woods in a pram. Images flash up of people she has seen and things that have happened to her during her walks there. They are like shrines in her memory, images that marked her life in the woods which, along with the actual shrine, will soon be destroyed.
– Clio David
Description source: publicity materials