Peeling potatoes and vacuuming carpets are elevated from the mundane into perfect acts of domestic glue in the gorgeously affecting THE QUIET GIRL.
Set in Ireland in the early 1980s the quiet girl of the title is Cáit, sent to live with two older relatives she’s never met, Eibhlín and Seán.
The reason for the relocation is that Cáit’s Ma is about to drop her latest bundle of joy in an already cramped environment. Her Da is nothing but a sportive sperm donor, as rash with his gonads as his gambling.
Such is life.
Her new home, a dairy farm, is fraught with fumbling the unfamiliar she forms a close bond with the older couple as she experiences the love and affection she was never provided at home.
THE QUIET GIRL is a quiet, beautiful, lyrical film, a flawless emerald in a jewel box of gems that make up this year’s Irish Film Festival.
Opening the festival this Thursday night at the Chauvel Cinema is STEPS OF FREEDOM, a toe tappin’ history of Irish dance. Fascinating and uplifting, it traces the origins and traditions and its growth thanks to great diaspora of the Irish, especially in the United States. It’s no mean feat to fashion a feature film about the fleet footed, dead arm art form, but STEPS OF FREEDOM pulses with drama, history, defiance and beauty to keep audiences enthralled.
Another documentary of high calibre is YOUNG PLATO, a fly on the wall examination of an Elvis obsessed primary school headmaster in Belfast’s Ardoyne district who has set up a Philosophy Class in a bid to quell old resentments and instil a new hope for his pupils. A real life Mr. Chips, YOUNG PLATO is a real serve of To Sir With Love, a prince among principals.
Narrative fiction is well served with YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER, a sinister story rooted to Ireland’s folk fairy stories, about changelings and shape shifters. It’s an effective and affecting horror story that relies on a real sense of unease rather than schlock stock.
And REDEMPTION OF A ROGUE is a bit of biting blarney with the return of the prodigal precipitating the death of the father, an event that triggers an unprecedented period of precipitation, a flood of fear, a deluge of dream fever, an inundation of innuendo.
Oblique and unique, these films resist and relish national images in equal measure, exuding an existential state of being associated with certain traits and traditions.
THE IRISH FILM FESTIVAL plays The Chauvel Cinema and on line from 25th August 2022