IRISH FILM’S QUIET REVOLUTION

Halfway through An Cailín Ciúin, there is a line of such piercing clarity, it stops you dead in your tracks: ‘You don’t have to say anything, always remember that. Many a person has missed the opportunity to say nothing, and lost much because of it.’ It is spoken to Cáit, the nine-year-old quiet girl of the title, by Seán Cinnsealach who, with his wife Eibhlín, has taken her in during the summer of 1981 while Cáit’s mother prepares to give birth to her fifth child. Home life is spartan, impoverished and unpredictable, thanks to Cáit’s feckless drinking and gambling father, but through the attention and care of her temporary foster parents, she finds the true power of being nurtured and loved.

Nor it is a one-way street, because Cáit helps them finally deal with a secret they have kept from her, and the resolution of sorts is guaranteed to break your heart.

The film won six of the 11 awards for which it was nominated at this year’s IFTAs – including Best Film, and nods for director Colm Bairéad, who also wrote the screenplay, cinematographer Kate McCullough, editor John Murphy, production designer Emma Lowney, and lead actress, the quite astonishing 12-year-old Catherine Clinch in her debut performance.

How Colm and producer Cleona Ní Chrualaoí – the couple are married, having met through work in 2009, and together run production company Inscéal – found Catherine is a story in itself. ‘We started casting in October 2019,’ Cleona explains. ‘Originally we were focusing on the Munster region because the story is set in the Gaeltacht of An Rinn in Co Waterford. We decided to extend our search, and we had set up four or five days of auditions for April 2020. Then Covid hit.

‘We put a call out to all the people who were lined up to send in tapes instead, and they came flooding in. One day in May, we got a very special tape from Catherine, who is from Rathmines in Dublin. I think it was a Friday evening. I just remember watching it and thinking, “wow, this is Cáit – we’ve found her”.

‘It was such a relief finding someone so strong like that, with the kind of composure and emotional intelligence she showed in that first audition. We were just really lucky to have found her, or maybe she found us.’

Colm chips in. ‘She had done speech and drama but it was her first time acting in front of the camera,’ he says. ‘It was kind of remarkable from the get-go. We did some tests and, just immediately, she was so at home, willing to let the camera be with her and not be self-conscious at all.’

The film is an adaption of Foster, by acclaimed author Claire Keegan. ‘I read an article in the Irish Times about the ten best literary works of the 21st century by Irish female authors,’ Colm explains. ‘Foster was on it and for whatever reason, it captured my interest. I ordered it and it actually is very slight. The author doesn’t even like to call it a novella – she calls it a long short story, because it’s about 80 pages. I was just blown away by it. By the end, I was in tears and just profoundly moved by it, and I really felt there was there was potential to turn it into a film.’

The reason why the line about saying nothing is so powerful is because this really is a film about silence. ‘There are many different types of silence,’ Colm says. ‘There is the silence of shame, and the silence of grief, and even in a weird way, the silence of love, that kind of particular difficulty that Irish people have, or certainly used to have, in terms of communicating their emotions.

‘Even the title of the film, The Quiet Girl, well, Cáit starts off as a particular type of quiet girl, but by the end, she has taken agency over that. She has taken on board what Seán has said in that regard, and she understands the