How Tres­pass Against Us changed my per­cep­tion of travellers

Recent­ly I went to see the new Michael Fass­ben­der film, Tres­pass Against Us, and came out changed. A few years ago I was liv­ing and work­ing in the area where the film is set, an idyl­lic vil­lage in the heart of the Cotswolds typ­i­cal­ly found on the front of bis­cuit tins. The trav­eller fam­i­ly in the film are loose­ly based on the real-life John­son clan, the sub­jects of the 2005 doc­u­men­tary Sum­mer with the John­sons which Tres­pass Against Us writer Alas­tair Sid­dons worked on as an assis­tant producer.

The main focus of the sto­ry is Chad Cut­ler (Fass­ben­der) and his young fam­i­ly, and how this rela­tion­ship is put under strain by the neg­a­tive influ­ence of his reli­gious­ly devout father, Col­by (Bren­dan Glee­son). Chad wants to do right by his son and give him the oppor­tu­ni­ties he nev­er had, name­ly an edu­ca­tion and domes­tic sta­bil­i­ty. How­ev­er, he doesn’t seem to pos­sess the right pater­nal tools to help make this hap­pen. Con­stant­ly com­ing up against prej­u­dice with­in the local non-trav­eller com­mu­ni­ty, he strug­gles to escape the life of crime he has been born into – the only life he real­ly knows.

Watch­ing the film, I could see my own prej­u­dices reflect­ed in the atti­tudes of the local vil­lagers. In the vil­lage I lived and worked in, a trav­eller fair like the one seen in the film (which goes unnamed but will be instant­ly recog­nis­able to any­one from the area) is held twice a year. The week of the fair, the major­i­ty of shops and pubs in the sur­round­ing vil­lages would shut. The pub I worked in stayed open, but we would strip the shelves and walls of every­thing valu­able that wasn’t fixed down, and the shops that stayed open were flanked by secu­ri­ty guards.

I remem­ber feel­ing guilt at treat­ing these peo­ple with such pre­sump­tive hos­til­i­ty. In fact, the one trav­eller fam­i­ly that spent any time in my pub dur­ing the fair were not only pleas­ant and respect­ful, but left a gen­er­ous tip. Still, rumours of shops being bro­ken into and locals being held up at knife point, along with numer­ous oth­er acts of theft and van­dal­ism, imme­di­ate­ly began to swirl. These claims were not entire­ly unfound­ed: at one shop I worked in, £50,000 worth of stock was tak­en in a sin­gle hit, a crime car­ried out in almost the exact the same man­ner as the thefts depict­ed in the film.

In my expe­ri­ence, there is a basic lack of human­i­ty in the way that trav­ellers are per­ceived. Tres­pass Against Us bridges this gap with­out min­imis­ing or jus­ti­fy­ing their crimes. The film sim­ply allows the view­er to view these peo­ple though a dif­fer­ent lens. It cre­ates empa­thy, which is so often miss­ing from films about or fea­tur­ing trav­eller communities.

By show­ing the strength of the bonds between the char­ac­ters and the love they have for each oth­er, first-time direc­tor Adam Smith brings us clos­er to a group of peo­ple who are sim­ply try­ing to live their lives as best they can, often fal­ter­ing in their attempts to do so. Sev­er­al scenes depict­ing fam­i­ly life inside the car­a­van con­vey a pal­pa­ble sense of inti­ma­cy, the char­ac­ters’ phys­i­cal prox­im­i­ty serv­ing as a neat visu­al metaphor for the close­ness of their relationships.

Trav­el­ling com­mu­ni­ties are still met with hatred and deri­sion wher­ev­er they go, mar­gin­alised due to pre­vail­ing stereo­types and a gen­er­al lack of under­stand­ing from soci­ety at large. This film, which is not with­out its flaws, places the top­ic on the table for dis­cus­sion. Michael Fass­ben­der recent­ly told the Cana­di­an arts mag­a­zine Q: ​“There is still this divide [between trav­eller and set­tled com­mu­ni­ties]. I felt like if we could make this film per­haps peo­ple could start to talk about it again and start to address the issue.”

After watch­ing Tres­pass Against Us, I found myself dis­cussing this issue with friends and fam­i­ly, reflect­ing on my own pre­con­ceived notions of trav­ellers. I felt chal­lenged to con­sid­er why I still held cer­tain views about peo­ple whom I had no right to judge. The film opened my eyes to the prej­u­dice that I, like so many peo­ple liv­ing in my old vil­lage, have car­ried around for too long. It left me with a more round­ed per­spec­tive of a cul­ture I thought I knew some­thing about.