Earlier this year, An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) made history as the first Irish-language film to premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, winning the Grand Prix of the Generation Plus International Jury for Best Film along the way. Director Colm Bairéad’s narrative feature debut has subsequently been named Best Irish Film by the Dublin Film Critics Circle at the Dublin International Film Festival and has swept the boards at the Iftas, converting some seven of 11 nominations in categories that pitched the film against such heavyweight competition as Passing, The Lost Daughter and Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning Belfast.
“It’s something every filmmaker probably dreams about,” says Bairéad. “But it has exceeded all our expectations. I do recall when we were filling in forms at Screen Ireland about our hopes for the film, and we had specifically put down that we wanted to get into the Generation programme at Berlin. It was extraordinary to get into that. And then to win something. The whole idea of an Irish-language film being able to go toe to toe with world cinema was really special. And coming home and winning the Audience Award and the Film Critics Award and to get that recognition from a home audience was really meaningful as well.
“It shows that the Irish language elements are handled in a way that feels organic, that people are responding to it as a piece of filmmaking, not something contrived like something with people walking down Grafton Street speaking Irish for no particular reason.”
An Cailín Ciúin is adapted from Claire Keegan’s Foster – the author prefers to call the project a “long short story” rather than a novella – a much-admired work that is currently on the Leaving Certificate syllabus. Set in the early 1980s, the film concerns Cáit (essayed by Catherine Clinch), a withdrawn nine-year-old girl, who is sent away by her pregnant mother to stay with relatives for the summer. Cáit is immediately fussed over by Eibhlín, played by Carrie Crowley, with care and attention to which the young girl, hailing from a large family, is unaccustomed. Eibhlín’s husband Seán (Andrew Bennett) is initially gruff towards his new charge, but slowly the pair bond, just as Cáit comes to realise that the kindly couple has a secret.
Character focused
“As I was reading Claire’s story, I was certainly seeing some kind of a shape of the film, in my mind it was constructing itself,” says Bairéad. “And also a kind of fear of, well, I’m getting quite excited about this material, but is this material actually available?
“I just fell in love with the story. I suppose it touches on a lot of themes that have been present in my short films, as pretty much all of my shorts are centred on younger people. But Foster, because it’s written in first person, in present tense, immediately feels quite visual and empathetic and character focused. With some theoretical exceptions, film is a present-tense medium.
“I suppose at the same time, I’m reading it and I’m also thinking there’s not a huge amount of plot. I realised early on I would need to add details, constructed from references to events from the character’s home life. So I kind of seized upon some of those things and expanded them into the opening act of the film. That was a leap of faith because the film is not reliant on plot at all. You can summarise it as: a girl goes and stays with relatives.
“And so the narrative tension of the film is derived completely from point of view, by placing the audience in this girl’s shoes. You want to hold your audience with creativity that is emotionally compelling. There’s a great quote by Mark Cousins in the documentary series The Story of Children and Film. He says: if you look closely and openly at a small thing, you can see a great deal. That was our story.”
The small, pertinent details of An Cailín Ciúin’s delicate script are articulated by a terrific ensemble, and particularly by the extraordinary lead performance given by newcomer Clinch. Speaking recently on the Late Late Show, Crowley described her 12-year-old co-star’s turn as “a masterclass in screen acting”.
“My wife is the film’s producer and we spent a long time looking for Cáit,” says Bairéad. “This being our first feature, we kind of naively decided not to hire a casting director, and save ourselves that chunk of the budget. We felt like, ‘oh, well, like, we’re both Irish speakers and the language is obviously really important’. We were worried that a casting director might not have the ear for the language.
“We had open auditions and calls at gaelscoils for a few months. And then Covid reared its head. and we had to go with self tapes, and we got this extraordinary tape at the last minute from Catherine, just down the road in Rathgar. It had an interiority that was really striking. You were leaning forward into this little phone video, completely engrossed in her character, engrossed in what she was doing, in what she wasn’t showing you. And that’s the essence of great screen acting.”
A natural progression
Bairéad grew up in a bilingual home in Donaghmede where his dad, a schoolteacher who taught German, spoke exclusively in Irish.
“My dad was involved in setting up a local gaelscoil and so we all ended up going to that,” says Bairéad. “It was a bit of an unusual thing in the northside. And when you’re a kid, you really don’t want to be different as that marks you out. At the time I didn’t really appreciate the way we grew up. But I’m very grateful for it now.”
While the younger Colm was growing up, the family television set went on the blink, leaving the family with books and occasional cinema visits for entertainment until the Republic of Ireland’s presence at Italia 1990 demanded a new TV unit and a VHS that was later utilised for 1950s Hollywood musicals and such classic Chaplin films as Modern Times.
Irish language, however, became part of the writer-director’s practice early on, through a 2010 TG4 programme run through Filmbase.
“I took part in a scheme called Údar – which is the Irish word for author – that had a mentorship element,” recalls the director. “ And then you get to make a short film at the end of it. So I did that with Paddy Breathnach (I Went Down, Viva). And then with Declan Recks (Eden, The Flag). I was lucky to be involved with people who had foresight and vision. So when an opportunity to develop a feature came along, it felt like a natural progression.”
An Cailín Ciúin arrives as part of a new wave of Irish language films, including the rural drama Foscadh, the famine-themed award-winning Arracht, and the incoming canine comedy, Rósie and Frank. Produced by Cleona Ní Chrualaoi for Inscéal, the production company she co-founded with Bairéad, An Cailín Ciúin was financed through the admirably daring Cine 4 production and development funding initiative led by Irish-language TV broadcaster TG4, in association with Screen Ireland and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.
“I’ve been saying this for years but I’m so excited,” says Bairéad. “I’m really excited about seeing other Irish-language films, quite apart from my own interests and involvement. It’s just so forward thinking and refreshing and it’s a nice corrective as well. You look at the history of Irish cinema and – I don’t know the exact numbers of Irish language films – but it’s got to be fairly low. There’s Mise Éire and Poitín and I’m probably forgetting some there, but it’s no more than a handful. And now, thanks to this scheme and TG4, the canon has mushroomed almost overnight.
“I do think there has been this sort of latent talent pool of Irish-speaking filmmakers and that the opportunity or the feasibility of making an Irish language was trickier before. It needed that sort of flag in the ground from those stakeholders to say: we want to support this; we want to create a movement.”
The new wave that the director is currently surfing, as he notes, is part of a larger revival. In recent years, three Basque-language films have been acquired by Netflix: Loreak (2014), Handia (2017) and Errementari (2018); the Smithsonian’s Mother Tongue Film Festival has platformed films in Siberian Yupik, Maxakali, Gujarati and Haitian Creole; and China’s 21st century ecocinema has produced such global hits as Lu Chuan’s Mountain Patrol, which was written in the Tibetan language and or Liu Jie’s Lisu-language Deep in the Clouds.
“I think what’s been happening in Basque and Catalan cinema in recent years for instance, should be a real source of inspiration for us,” says Bairéad. “Carla Símon’s Summer 1993 was actually a real touchstone for me with our film. I think it’s a masterclass in terms of presenting a child’s point of view and being utterly faithful to that. An Cailín Ciúin is aesthetically quite different, but both films share that same intent. And of course, you have a Catalan film winning the Golden Bear this year. Símon again, of course!
“There’s no reason that Irish-language cinema shouldn’t be thinking in those terms. There are works of Irish-language literature that can and have been recognised as great works of world literature. Why shouldn’t we aspire to the same for Irish-language films?”
An Cailín Ciúin opens May 12th
