"In the year 2000, not long after the Good Friday peace agreement,1 the Irish artist John Byrne opened the Border Interpretative Centre, which sat on the invisible border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The small cottage-like building was ostensibly a sardonically humorous gesture referring to the absurdity and violent implications that the existence of a border necessitates. The center operated as a gift shop that sold objects such as miniature British army watchtowers and souvenir T-shirts. During the opening of the center a plaque was unveiled to mark the occasion by the comedian Kevin McAleer, who, in a deadpan mannered interview with the BBC, declared that the “Irish” border was “the best” border and that it was “something that united the whole country.” The exact address of the center was to many an enigma. An address might imply the particulars of a place, a jurisdiction, a country where someone lives or where a building or an organization is situated, but there are exceptions to such absurd fabrications, and the politics of such exceptions are wholly dependent upon wider ideological systems. One exception would be the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which is partially the subject of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s engrossing and meticulously realized film 45th Parallel."