In Pat Murphy and John Davies' innovatively structured Maeve, a young woman living in exile returns to visit her family in Belfast. The trip triggers a series of recollections; "the past is a way of acting on the present," she intones, marking a key theme of Irish cinema. We see Maeve as a child, a young woman, and in the present as she interacts with her family and friends whose personal stories reveal differing ways of dealing with living in divided Belfast. "Particularly critical of the range of models available to women in Catholic Northern Ireland (notably the mother-as-martyr posture espoused by women whose sons have been murdered by the British occupying forces), Maeve joins its inquiry into how women should live in contemporary Belfast society-a colonized country-with a broader political inquiry into the status of Republicanism itself as it inflects the lives and behavior of one Catholic family." (British Film Institute) (KG)