“You’re out there by yourself. You don’t have a flotation device or anything. I just wear, like, small fins.”
Alice Ward is describing the hazards of surf photography.
“You need to be really fit, and you need to be able to read the ocean,” she continues. “I know my limits. I’m pretty sensible about where I go out. But there’s rips. You can get caught in a rip and be swimming for 20 or 30 minutes just trying to get out. So, I’d say you need to be fit, or else you’ll drown.”
The 29-year-old film-maker is one of the few female surf photographers in Ireland, having taught herself the ropes around seven years ago.
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“When I was a teenager, I thought that maybe 15 women surfed in Ireland,” she says. “And then when I moved to Sligo [from Dublin], I was shocked, because there were so many women in the water. I was never able to find that media representation as a teenager, especially from a cold-water perspective.”
With a small amount of funding, and no real learning resources to draw on, she bought waterproof camera equipment and took the plunge, documenting “three fearless females”, Katie McAnena, Elizabeth Clyne, and Shawna Ward, in her debut short film, Ebb and Flow (2020).
“A lot of the surf films are all bikinis in Hawaii and Australia. So, I wanted to balance out the scales, especially in Ireland, because I felt like the portrayal was really heavy cold-water slabs [strong waves that break over a shallow rock shelf], and men in storms, and that kind of feeling.”
The film went on to screen in festivals around Ireland and beyond, winning best Women in Surf Film at the Portuguese Surf Film Festival. And Ward began to build a strong film portfolio, with shorts like Other Land (2022) and Oishii (2023). But the fourth “fearless female” – the one behind the camera – was one she never dreamed of turning the lens upon, until recently.
Raised in Dublin (first Drumcondra, and later, Howth and Sutton), Ward had a grá for the water from a young age. Her father was a long-distance open water swimmer, and she would swim or play in rock pools at High Rock in Malahide, while he trained or did races. But it wasn’t until she was a teenager, on a trip to Dunfanaghy in Donegal, that she got a taste for what would become a lifelong love.
“I did a surf camp there for a week with some friends and I got hooked,” she says. “I started going back to Dunfanaghy every summer, working there during the summers.”
Later, having completed a degree in multimedia in Dublin City University, she moved to Sligo and began working as a videographer.
“I really hated my job. It was very much a nine-to-five office job. And after eight months, I ended up in hospital ... I had burnt myself out.”
Tedious though the job may have been, this was no ordinary case of burnout. For her whole life, Ward has been living with cystic fibrosis, a genetic chronic condition that affects the lungs and other organs. Her childhood had been punctuated by hospital visits, and though had things levelled out from her teen years onwards, this latest was “quite a bad admission”.
Instead of returning to the grind of the nine-to-five, she decided to quit her job and “really focus in on trying to get more involved in the outdoor film industry and shooting in the water”. For her, spending time in the sea had always been more than a hobby. The ocean was a mysterious, life-giving force.
“When I quit my job, I was in hospital for three weeks. My consultants brought me into the room, and they were like: ‘You need to prepare. You’re going to be in hospital now at least every year or twice a year, now that you’re getting older. This is the reality, you just need to get over it.’ That was six years ago, and I haven’t been in hospital since.”
In her new, autobiographical short film, Ward explores her deep connection to the sea and the ways in which the ocean, and its saltwater properties, have helped to regulate her health and wellbeing.
“I never intended to make it; I’d never had any interest in my own story,” she says.
Then, two years ago, at the London Surf Film Festival, she got talking to the festival’s director, Demi Taylor.
“We got into conversation about the ocean and health, and I just casually dropped it in – oh, I have cystic fibrosis and I find great benefits from being in the sea.”
Taylor suggested she make a film about her experience, but Ward brushed off the idea.
“I was like, No, absolutely not, I’d hate that!”
She thought little more of it, until last April, when London Surf Film Festival, along with the apparel brand Finisterre, released a fund to support female filmmakers. Taylor got in touch to suggest Ward pitch her story. Again, she refused.
“I was getting on a plane for a month-long getaway, and I was like, no. I’m not.”
But as the month went by, the idea percolated in her brain, and by the time she got home she had changed her mind.
“The main reason I made it was just thinking of the stereotypes other people put on people in any situation regarding health,” she says. “When I was a child, I was quite sick, and I spent a lot of time in and out of hospital. I felt that healthcare professionals, and teachers in schools, maybe, put limitations on me – coming from a place of care. But I never really took them seriously or believed that I was an ill person.”
When she was a baby, her parents had been told she wouldn’t live past 19. Then when she was 19, she was told the life expectancy for a person with cystic fibrosis was mid-30. But she didn’t want to map her life to these markers of doom.
“If I believed the stats and figures of how my life was going to progress, I wouldn’t have done all the things I’ve done. That’s why I wanted to make [the film]. If I fed into that whole belief that I was this ill person and this is what my life was going to look like, I don’t think I would have gone and done all the things I’ve done, and been as healthy as I have been.”
In 12 short minutes, Salt captures a dreamlike world between land and sea, air and water, pairing the rich textural landscape of the northwest coast of Ireland with the story of a life lived with, and in defiance of, a chronic illness.
“My number one goal is to make people feel like they’re in the water, and nearly feel it, or hear it,” says Ward.
The motif of salt recurs – “Why is my baby so salty?” we hear her mother ask, early on, articulating a symptom of cystic fibrosis (salty skin) long before it is diagnosed. And photographic blueprints called cyanotypes are interspersed throughout.
“They’re one of the earliest forms of photography, and they actually use chemicals containing a salt component, so that was another way to link salt.”
In Ward’s daily life, salt is quite literally medicinal.
“I take nebulisers twice a day, which are like inhaled medication, and I take saline solution twice a day, which is just salt water. So, the salt water actually breaks up a lot of the mucus in my lungs and clears my chest.”
Much of the story is told through interview recordings with her parents. Did the fact that they were family make the interview process difficult?
“I think chatting to them was fine, because we don’t mind talking about it. But editing it was really hard, because there was maybe an hour-and-a-half of interview footage, and trying to pick out what bits to use [was difficult]. I wanted Salt to be a quite positive story, but a lot of my childhood was ... not,” she laughs wryly. “It’s kind of hard to listen back to. Editing it was hard – I just sat down and did it in one day and then that was it, I didn’t go back to it at all.”
The film does manage to convey a positive story – one of empowerment and contentment, anchored by her mother’s powerful vow that she would no longer worry, and focus instead on the fact that her daughter’s future would be nothing other than fantastic.
For Ward, a sudden realisation came when editing, that while on the one hand she was making the film “for people in a similar position to me”, she was also making it for parents.
“Any parents can be thrown into that world, no matter what’s wrong with their baby. So that became a theme, which wasn’t something I had planned. And parents really resonate with it.”
Salt, directed and edited by Alice Ward with cinematography by Joao Tudella, is produced by Sea Pea Films. It will be screened as part of the Fastnet Film Festival in west Cork in May, and made available online in 2026
