Making `The Quiet Girl' heard
How Colm Bairéad’s debut film, scripted in Irish, gained the ear of Oscar voters
It’s two days after Colm Bairéad attended the 2023 Oscar nominees luncheon, and the Irish writer-director of “The Quiet Girl” is still processing his first time at the star-studded annual event.
“Was that a dream? I’m not sure if that actually happened,” Bairéad says, laughing, when asked about his social media photos with such luminaries as Steven Spielberg and Guillermo Del Toro, as well as with a flock of his fellow Irish nominees from “The Banshees of Inisherin.”
“I’m glad there’s photos to prove that actually happened,” he says. “But yeah, what an experience, meeting all these sort of giants of cinema and just personal heroes of mine. It was an extraordinary, just a beautiful occasion.
“There’s a real sense of community, you know. You feel like you’re part of something.”
That Bairéad and “The Quiet Girl” joined the community of Academy Awards hopefuls this year speaks to the powerful, moving beauty of the first-ever Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar; it’s up for best international film.
It’s a small, delicate story, told through the eyes of 9-year-old Cáit, withdrawn and overlooked in her large, dysfunctional family. When another baby is due, she’s sent to live with distant relatives, a childless older couple with a painful secret in their own family, where over the summer she finds affection and happiness.
“The Quiet Girl,” or “An Cailín Ciúin,” as it’s titled in Irish, is Bairéad’s feature film debut after working mostly in nonfiction filmmaking. There’s a documentarian’s eye for small, beautiful moments in this new film, and it’s a fellow documentary filmmaker, Northern Irish director Mark Cousins, whose words inspired Bairéad to find the story in this subtle tale.
“He says, ‘Art shows us again and again that, if we look closely and openly at a