Travellers represent at once one of our most striking social problems and one of the biggest repositories of a unique national culture. While poverty, alcoholism, illiteracy and unemployment are rife amongst the community - and are thorny issues for any sitting government - the pavee, with their cultural distinctiveness of language, music and nomadic movement are an important part of the nation’s psyche. As one academic has suggested before, they are a concentration of the Irish people. All the stereotypes that were levelled at the bulk of Irish people are now levelled at travellers.

This is where Perry Ogden’s new film steps. Pavee Lackeen – The Travelling Girl – has already won a swathe of awards including the Satyajit Ray Award for the best first feature premiered at the London Film Festival, Best Feature at the Galway Film Festival and best film at the Irish Film and Television Awards. It is of course award-friendly material – telling the tale of a 10-year old travelling girl living in a trailer in Ringsend and portrayed in gritty and shaky digital video – but this is not your typical bleeding-heart liberal film.

Despite being a narrative film, there is a distinctively documentary feel to this, helped by both the camera work and the naturalistic acting. The latter is occasionally extraordinary, particularly from the main character, Winnie (Winnie Maughan). The cast is a mix of professional actors and largely non-professional actors, most of who are drawn from the travelling community (and indeed seemingly from just two different families). It’s a blend that makes the movie hard to characterise, but certainly interesting to watch.

That said the documentarian method – without exposition, development, resolution and normal narrative techniques – gives the film a slightly dissatisfying feel to those who expect such things from a movie. The tale meanders, with long shots of Winnie’s banal activities such as wandering through the prosperous city-centre, washing her hair in the single outdoor tap, collecting water from an overflow pipe and generally living a harsh existence at odds with our First World society.

But what makes this film a cut above other works dealing with such communities is that it does not seek to answer or even pose social questions. We are never told how to feel about these people and we are never told how their issues should be dealt with. One extended scene, when Winnie walks through a Russian video shop and an African hairdresser’s on Moore Street, makes a link between the “new Irish” and the travellers while not directly commenting on it. The only conclusion one can come to though, is that those in the lower class of the travellers have an even more difficult time of it then those who have travelled here. Which is saying a LOT…

Despite the family’s (all ten children of them) suffering at the hand of bureaucracy and red-tape, it’s difficult to feel sympathy for the mother when she refuses the offer of housing because it is not in a certain (increasingly prosperous) area. A social worker at the beginning of the film asks that she move into a four-bedroom house in Ballyfermot, but her male relatives dissuade her from accepting it. It’s an important vignette that at once illustrates the difficulty of dealing with their poverty from society’s point-of-view and the patriarchal nature of traveller culture.

Director Perry Ogden has created an important film here, though many may find it both distressing and slightly tedious. The visuals, informed by Ogden’s background in photography, are striking but may alienate more traditional film-watchers, particularly with the preponderance of nauseating shakycam. However, it is unlikely that a better Irish film will appear this year.