IFI Irish Film Archive

Small Change

Year2010 Duration18m 00s

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.

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.

15m 00s

Take Me Swimming

‘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.

11m 00s

Rúbaí

‘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.

15m 00s

Into the Abyss

A fictional story of a young woman who unexpectedly returns home to Dublin for Christmas. She has been in London for ten months but reveals little about her new life. Sandra feels alienated from her family and they are clearly resentful about her sudden and unannounced return. The atmosphere is laden with tension, in stark contrast to traditional depictions of happy families at Christmastime, a contrast which is underscored by the harmonious sounds of Cantique and The Voice Squad. Sandra is reminded of the difficulties which forced her to leave home. Faced with renewed hostility, she chooses not to disclose the truth of her new life and after a brief and unhappy stay, she returns to London and a life of grinding hardship. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.

2m 55s

Introduction - 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. Snakes and Ladders (1997), her debut feature, was one of the first Irish films directed by a woman about contemporary women’s lives, and she continued to position women squarely on screen with her ground-breaking documentary series, Hoodwinked: Irish Women Since the 1920s. Her interest in other artists is evident in her documentary profiles of Leo O’Kelly, Donal O’Kelly and Liu Xiabo. She has recently explored new modes of storytelling in her formally exciting short films Strangers to Kindness (2015) and Confinement (2019). 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. Trish approached the IFI Archive Player looking to discover some hidden gems showing an alternative Irish character. Her choices can be broken down into three eras: early representations of Ireland on film (1910s – 1920s); changing culture in Ireland (1950s – 1970s); and contemporary Irish filmmaking (1980s – 2000s). The wide-ranging selection, in her own words ‘not so much a tip of an iceberg, as a scattering within the iceberg,’ is free to watch on the IFI Archive Player anywhere in the world.

27m 00s

Statistic

‘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. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.