IFI Irish Film Archive
‘The day I don’t know who you are, promise to take me swimming’ – a melancholic promise between a husband and wife as her Alzheimer’s disease progresses. When Thady (Barry Ward) returns to his parents’ home for a neighbour’s wake, he is shocked by his mother’s decline (Olwen Fouéré, also seen in The Wake). Gone is the eloquent artist of the television interviews, and here now is a woman who has lost her capacity to carry out the most mundane tasks and spends her days in a local care centre. When he finds the crumpled promise in the pocket of an old dressing gown, the rest of his visit is spent bitterly resenting his mother’s condition and his father’s stoic acceptance. It is only when his mother goes missing in the middle of the night that he begins to understand how their love transcends her condition. Director Claire Dix and writer Ailbhe Keogan have since collaborated on the feature film Sunlight. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.
Women in Focus is a curated selection of films by five wildly independent female amateur filmmakers: Margaret Currivan; Agnes Heron; Flora Kerrigan; Beres Laidlaw; and Sister Maureen MacMahon. Women's creative work has been under-reported and under-recognised and can be challenging to catalogue due to a lack of recorded primary information. This is exacerbated when dealing with amateur or non-professional filmmaking, where the work of individual women filmmakers has been even more invisible. In 2021, the IFI Film Archive acknowledged a limitation in the IFI Film Archive research resources and put a request out to academic partners to assist in developing new tools that would highlight the work of female filmmakers within the collection. This resulted in a collaborative research project that developed new approaches to cataloguing the creative contribution of women filmmakers in local, regional, and national archives. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Irish Research Council, as part of the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities scheme, the project is a UK-Ireland collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Maynooth University, and the University of Sussex, with the IFI Irish Film Archive and East Anglian Film Archive as archive partners. The project has resulted in the creation of a cataloguing toolkit that helps archives with moving image collections to create clear, relevant, and easily accessible records about female filmmakers. The work presented here formed case studies for the toolkit and was digitised by the IFI Irish Film Archive. A larger selection of films from the project will be made available on the IFI Archive Player in 2025.
The Irish-speaking customers of an isolated pub on a remote western island wait patiently for a delivery of Guinness, until finally the keg-filled currach is spotted. This well-known advert won a Clio award in New York for Arks Advertising in 1978, a Silver Cannes Lion and further awards from the Advertising Awards Festival, ICAD and Rank Screen Awards. Subtitles kindly provided by Báirbre Dolan and Saidhbh Ní Dhúlaing.
A solitary woman walks through the eerie night-time landscape of Dublin’s Cork Street, a street once quiet and residential, now a four-laned artery for city traffic. Cork Street, as described by the narrators Councillor John Gallagher, architect Gerry Cahill, journalist Frank McDonald and sociologist Aileen O’Gorman, used to be a much better place to live than it is today. Gone are the days when people could easily cross the road to visit neighbours or children could safely play on the street. Urban planners carved out this four-laned artery to connect the city with its outlying suburbs. Furthermore, a decision to fence off open spaces in an attempt to prevent anti-social behaviour , succeeded only in promoting social isolation for the residents who still call Cork Street home. The isolation is embodied in the character of a young woman (actor Niamh Algar, nominated for a BAFTA for 2019’s Calm with Horses) who walks through the deserted urban landscape as memories are narrated which no longer match the present-day surroundings. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.
‘God is everywhere, Rúbaí. Everyone knows that.’ – Despite her teacher’s declaration, eight-year-old Rúbaí challenges the existence of God in the days before her Holy Communion. When Rúbaí continues to challenge her teacher and announces to the visiting priest that she is an atheist, she provokes their frustration and leaves them speechless when she cites Charles Darwin as ‘a fella who makes sense’. Enigmatic scenes of this solitary child purposefully digging in the garden are intercut with scenes of her reluctant preparations with her mother for the Communion Day. Her mother is impatient with her classroom defiance and her preoccupation with evolution but ultimately understands what is driving her to behave this way. This film won many awards including Best Short at the Babel Film Festival in Sardinia. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.
IFTA-winning director Anna Rodgers highlights the plight of those who suffered and died in Dublin’s old psychiatric institutions. Opening with a quotation from Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture, in which the main character is a resident in a Roscommon mental institution, the film takes us on a haunting tour of a vast and desolate building, once an Irish asylum. The voices of former residents describe their experience recounting their loneliness and suffering, and the harsh practice of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Their recollections reveal how people were committed and shed light on the social, economic and political factors that lead to their admission. The decision to feature voices and not faces allows the residents to maintain their anonymity. This film won the IFI’s Best Short at the Stranger Than Fiction Awards (now IFI Documentary Festival) and Best Documentary at the Kerry Film Festival in 2010. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.