The Quiet Girl making a noise at film festivals

An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl), an Oscar-shortlisted Irish-language movie telling a simple yet moving story of an introspective child packed off to distant relatives, “started off making a tiny bit of noise” when it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last February, says director Colm Bairéad. It went on to scoop a prize there “and just slowly, since then, the beating of its drum has gotten louder and louder”.

A clutch of other festival appearances and awards later, The Quiet Girl is now vying to be one of the five nominees for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards when the 15-strong shortlist is whittled down on January 24.

Piercingly poignant, with no trace of saccharine, the beautifully shot story of Cáit, a neglected nine-year-old girl dispatched to virtual strangers in rural Ireland in 1981 by her harried mother, pregnant with yet another child, and indifferent father, was snubbed by big US festivals. But the tale of trauma and tenderness has struck a chord with audiences, transforming the low-budget production into the highest-grossing Irish-language film in history, taking more than €1mn at the box office in Ireland and the UK.

“It feels like our film has taken on a life of its own and it’s almost got a belligerence to it — [as if] to prove itself to people or something,” says Bairéad in a video call shortly before flying to Los Angeles, where Academy members vote to select nominees from January 12-17. He adds that he sometimes needed Google Translate to read the messages he received from viewers around the world empathising with the experiences of Cáit, through whose eyes the film is seen.

Although it is based on the English-language novella Foster by Irish writer Claire Keegan, making the film in Irish was key for Bairéad. Fully bilingual in a country where less than 2 per cent of the population speaks Irish every day, he never speaks anything else to his two sons.

“I just had this burning, burning desire to adapt it and a real clear vision for it,” Bairéad says. “It’s a story that’s getting at something quite profound in terms of our emotional and psychological make-up as a people. And it always felt rather apt to me that that story should be explored through our indigenous tone.”

As the film is set at a time in Ireland when unwed mothers were bundled into cruel institutions and Catholic priests preyed on boys, Cáit’s introverted nature and the painful secret her hosts never mention mirror the pervasive sense of an outwardly affable society unable to express its deepest feelings.

“It’s funny in a way because the film has been lauded as this shining example of an Irish-language artwork and yet at the same time, thematically, it’s a story about the limitations of language and how we kind of struggle oftentimes to articulate ourselves emotionally,” says Bairéad. “These are obviously characters from Ireland’s past. But I do think that we still have work to do.”

Reserved himself and often pausing to choose his words, Bairéad adds: “Irish people are obviously famous for being rather open-hearted or having a sort of kindness to them . . . But equally we’re stricken by this inability oftentimes to truly speak to one another.”

The director was propelled into film-making after a book-filled childhood — he recalls being moved to tears by Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince — and by the storytelling talents of his mother and movie-buff father. He was surprised and delighted to find the film rights to Foster available and set to work writing the screenplay with Keegan’s blessing.

His fascination with what he calls the “architecture of film” shines through in The Quiet Girl, his debut feature, which cost €1.3mn to make and is produced by his wife, Cleona Ní Chrualaoí.

His use of the so-called Academy ratio — a format that is boxier than cinema’s conventional widescreen — reinforces the fact that we are seeing the world from Cáit’s point of view, “someone whose horizons haven’t expanded yet . . . for whom there are things that are just out of reach, in terms of her understanding”, Bairéad says.

The success of The Quiet Girl comes as Martin McDonagh’s black comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, set on an island off the coast of Ireland, and its star Colin Farrell, are also tipped for possible Oscar glory. “I think it’s a help that there’s a perception out there that Irish cinema is thriving at the moment,” Bairéad says.

His recent schedule — “I don’t know how many countries I’ve been to in the last three months” — hasn’t left much time for writing, but he has two new ideas in development. One is about a faith healer in rural Ireland and the other is the story of a young woman in the 1950s who becomes a nun, and faces the moral quandary of the “terrible things” being done to other Irish women at the time.

“There are certain characters who present themselves to me in my mind and I try to ‘follow’ them,” Bairéad says. “It’s almost like I can see this character from behind . . . It’s the process of trying to get the camera around the other side and see the person for who they are.”

Ireland has entered Irish-language films for the Oscars before — Kings (for the 2008 awards); An Bronntanas (The Gift) (2015); Songs of Granite (2018); Arracht, (2021); and Foscadh (Shelter) (2022) — but all failed to make the cut.

Nevertheless, they, and last year’s comedy Róise & Frank, point to a renaissance under way — and Bairéad hopes The Quiet Girl will finally put Irish-language cinema fully on the map. “The longstanding presumption that making a film in Irish is somehow a dead end, either creatively or commercially, can be dispelled now.”

‘The Quiet Girl’ is available to rent or buy on streaming platforms