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Pluck

Year2002 Duration10m 00s
Pluck is director Neasa Hardiman and writer Emma Donoghue’s humorous take on how one little hair can create big problems in a marriage. When Liz’s husband Joe spots a hair growing out of her chin, he is repulsed. He becomes increasingly tormented by hair while reading to his daughter, cleaning the bathroom and watching the adverts on TV. When his hallucinations begin to spiral out of control, he goes to great lengths to get to the root of the problem. Despite the comedic tone, the film challenges gender norms – Joe is the primary caregiver in the home, Liz has a demanding job – and raises interesting questions about male expectations of female beauty. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.

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Karen (Nora-Jane Noone), a young single mother in border town Newry, is numbed by routine and her mundane existence as a supermarket shelf stacker. Amusement arcade slot machines have become her secret thrill and addiction. Her eight-year-old daughter Laura (Tina Maxwell) dreams of Christmas presents and sunny exotic family holidays, adding further pressure to Karen’s struggle to cope. As Karen’s close relationships begin to fracture, her decisions become more irrational. With Christmas looming, a desperate hope for a big win sees her life spiral out of control. Cathy Brady has mastered the art of the short film form. Small Change, like her other films, captures a fully realised character in crisis, and positions her within a wholly convincing, humdrum world. Brady’s collaboration with Nora-Jane Noone continues in her debut feature Wildfire. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.

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Women in Focus

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.

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Statistic - Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist

Our second IFI Filmmaker Playlist is curated by filmmaker and visual artist Trish McAdam. Since the production of her early shorts in the 1980s, Trish has created a vibrant and varied body of work, embracing a range of forms and subjects and retaining a singular, independent voice. We're delighted to welcome Trish to the Irish Film Institute to select her top picks from films preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive and presented on the IFI Archive Player. ‘Who needs a pregnant waitress?’ is just one of the questions that fills Ellie Connolly’s mind when she discovers she is pregnant in 1980s Ireland. Statistic was made by film student Alison Kelly in 1983, the year which saw the passing of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution Act (which effectively criminalised abortion in most circumstances). Ellie (Edel McCrann) is pregnant as “the result of a drunken screw between two people who hardly knew each other”.  She broods in her flat and discusses her predicament with her good friend Anne – she must tell her boyfriend Paul but she knows ’In the end it’s inside me, not him’.  She finds information in a magazine about abortion services in the UK and Anne accompanies her to the ferry – following the footsteps of the many women before her. Statistic is invaluable as a contemporaneous response to events in 1983 – the film includes newspaper headlines and filmed sequences of pro and anti-abortion marches and dramatizes the plight of a young woman dealing with a crisis pregnancy. It is also a vivid record of the sights and sounds of Dublin in the 1980s  - not least in the colourful cameos from mime artist Raymond Keane and indie band The Cuba Dares.

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Residents of rural Ireland reminisce on the joys and sorrows of phone boxes as they become obsolete in the modern world. When phone boxes were first introduced in Irish villages in the 1920s, there was stern competition between local businesses to have one installed outside their property. The phone box would assume a monumental role in many people’s lives allowing them to stay connected with loved ones and receive all sorts of important news. In Mayo, a couple celebrating their 50th anniversary credit the box for helping to keep their long-distance romance alive. In Donegal, a man laughingly recalls how two women became trapped inside one while trying to wait out a bad storm. A young man nervously calls a maternity hospital for news of his young wife. Although many of those interviewed admitted they do not use the service anymore, the phone box is a fondly remembered feature of Irish village life. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.

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