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This impeccable film made by writer-director Colm Bairéad and producer Cleona Ní Chrualaoi of production company Inscéal is still showing in its fifth week of release — an achievement in itself and testimony to the intertwined power of clever, advanced marketing, the influence in Britain of key critics Mark Kermode and Peter Bradshaw and, perhaps most importantly, word of mouth.
The film’s pre-production phase was itself interrupted by Covid — with auditions for the eponymous role replaced by a socially distanced callout for self-tapes — and, having fortuitously secured the vital insurance for the project in 2019, it was shot on location in Meath and Dublin in autumn 2020 during what was a period of heightened uncertainty and difficult for the screen industry, far from ideal conditions for making a debut feature.
A budget of €1.2 million is small even in the context of indie cinema, but then sometimes films thrive artistically precisely because there are the right number of cooks involved. There is an authenticity running through An Cailín Ciúin that may well be contingent upon the language it is written in but, to my mind, is absolutely related to its financing by €1.
These are problems Irish language cinema might like to have, but it hasn’t got them right now. As TG4 director-general Alan Esslemont told me last October, “you’re not going to get Warner Bros to straight off invest in the Irish language”. Derbhile Ní Churraighín, a TG4 commissioning editor, described the trio of funding partners as “a magic triangle that we can’t do without” and said TG4 could “live in hope” of realising an ambition it has been open about since the establishment of Cine4: an Oscar nomination for best international feature film.