Sligo-based filmmaker hopeful of local screening for award-winning re-telling of a classic story

“WOULDN’T it be great to show it there”, smiles award-winning film director Clea van der Grijn in reference to the fictional parish of Craggy Island and her latest big screen release, ‘The Disembodied Adventures of Alice’.

For the few of you who have not seen the classic comedy series, ‘Father Ted’, the comical priests are ordered by the Bishop to protest a controversial film being shown at the island’s cinema – with the end result of the clerics boosting the film’s popularity.

Clea’s film would also have Ted and Dougal outside the local picture house with placards that read “Down With This Sort Of Thing” and “Careful Now”.

Last month, the Sligo-based film maker had cause to celebrate as her movie scooped the Best Feature Film award at the prestigious New Jersey Film Festival.

“I wasn’t expecting the award at all – it was an absolutely gorgeous surprise,” she said in an exclusive interview with Sligo Weekender.

“We actually didn’t know that we were nominated. In this festival, they announce all the awards at the end – which is four weeks after it opens.

“So they don’t announce it until every single film has been screened and by that stage, we’d already come back to Ireland so we’d missed out on any conversation that might have been had. We only found out when we got home.

“However, the prime aim for us was to get the film out there, get it shown and hopefully get others around the globe to show it again. This was the first festival that we submitted to – which was great – and now it’s going to be the long, slow rollout of all the other film festivals. Some will hopefully accept it, some will reject it, maybe some rewards, maybe more rejections… you’ll never know how it’s going to go.”

The film itself – described at the New Jersey Festival as ‘a dark Irish fairytale’ – draws upon Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s tale, ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

However, Clea’s adaptation delves deeper into the characters themselves and their fragilities.

She added: “The film is not a typical fairytale story. It is very dark but beautiful to watch. It’s based loosely on the characters from ‘Alice in Wonderland’. Each of which have mental health illnesses.

“For example, Alice would have personality disorder and the caterpillar – the hookah-smoking caterpillar – is a drug addict etc, etc. So if you do a lot of research, you’ll find there have been many papers written about the mental illness of these characters which ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is based on.

“So I thought it would be interesting to work on these characters to emphasise their fragilities, and indeed their strengths, and create a different dynamic amongst the four characters (in my film) bringing in gender-swapping, elements of kink, elements of more nitty-gritty and seeing how the story would unravel taking into consideration the mental illness of each of the characters.

“Alice in Wonderland is read and seen by children but as they get older they wonder what on earth they had been reading when they were younger. In the Mad Hatter’s tea-party, in our film, we re-enacted that but used magic mushrooms instead of tea. So you have the teapot full of magic mushrooms.

“The line between what is real and what is not real, what is imagined, what is fantasy, what are dreams, what are nightmares… the film flips between is it hallucinating or is it reality.

“So the audience never quite knows whether they’re watching something that is a dream or a hallucination or a fact. That is because the core of the script is based around hallucinogenic drugs.

“I don’t know how this film came about. We had just finished making ‘Flux’ – which is all about mental fragility – and I was interested in the old Greek and Irish mythology of where at the witching hour, which I think is 3am, humans can turn into animals. Like in ‘The Children of Lir’.

“In a way, I was trying to work out how the humans in my film could also represent animals. I don’t know how my mind works but it just doesn’t stop and – as I also host painting exhibitions – when I’m painting, it all just bubbles and I write notes and do research and by the time the (painting) show is over, I have a script.”

Sligo film fans may have to wait a while to see Clea’s film – and it will be probably when her new production makes it to the big screen. Although the film festival circuit within Ireland could well be screening it long before that.

“The film hasn’t been screened here,” she continues. “I can’t show it outside of the film festival circuit because once you do that, you’re not eligible to be in the competition any more. There’s a lot of politics around how and when you show your films.

“We start shooting the next film – another dark adult fairytale, involving a very psychiatrically disturbed young woman and her doppelganger – on April 17, and that film will be premiered at the IFI in Dublin and they will also show ‘The Disembodied Adventures of Alice’ as well. It still has opportunities to be shown at the Cork Film Festival and other film festivals in Ireland before then.”