Irish language film scheme Cine4 is “only warming up” and “has the potential to do something special”, I wrote on these pages last August, which I’m counting as one of my better predictions, even though it wasn’t really a prediction, just self-evident fact.
Cine4, a still nascent partnership between TG4, Screen Ireland/Fís Éireann and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, has already done several special things, from existing in the first place to giving us An Cailín Ciúin, the “quiet” film that has now exceeded €600,000 at the Irish and UK box office, smashing records for an Irish language feature several times over.
This impeccable film made by writer-director Colm Bairéad and producer Cleona Ní Chrualaoi of production company Inscéal is still showing in its fifth week of release — an achievement in itself and testimony to the intertwined power of clever, advanced marketing, the influence in Britain of key critics Mark Kermode and Peter Bradshaw and, perhaps most importantly, word of mouth.
Jointly distributed by Curzon and Irish company Break Out Pictures, the adaptation of Claire Keegan’s story Foster starring Catherine Clinch, Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett has proven adept at drawing lapsed cinemagoers back to the big screen and bringing in high mid-week box office tallies. This was, and is, a film not to miss.
Its performance will be all the more satisfying to the film’s backers because this type of independent film cinema activity felt especially vulnerable, even on the cusp of being lost entirely, during the nightmare stop-start pandemic-afflicted months of tentative reopenings, restricted capacities and widespread nerviness.
The film’s pre-production phase was itself interrupted by Covid — with auditions for the eponymous role replaced by a socially distanced callout for self-tapes — and, having fortuitously secured the vital insurance for the project in 2019, it was shot on location in Meath and Dublin in autumn 2020 during what was a period of heightened uncertainty and difficulty for the screen industry, far from ideal conditions for making a debut feature.
But one security An Cailín Ciúin did have was the security of production funding. No early commercial backer was going to revise their market outlook post-Covid and pull the plug, because there was no early commercial backer with a plug to pull.
Instead, it was selected to go into production by Cine4, which aims to provide development money to up to five Irish language features per year and then produce two that display “strong storytelling, visual flair and high production values”, subject to a budget limit of €1.2 million. To date, the scheme has yielded five films, including the upcoming Róise & Frank.
A budget of €1.2 million is small even in the context of indie cinema, but then sometimes films thrive artistically precisely because there are the right number of cooks involved. There is an authenticity running through An Cailín Ciúin that may well be contingent upon the language it is written in but, to my mind, is absolutely related to its financing by €1.2 million in public Irish money, as well as the aid of the Section 481 tax incentive and additional help from a Covid production support fund introduced in 2020 by Screen Ireland.
It certainly feels refreshing to take a break from those films and television series that have a nominal Irish setting only for their “Irishness” to be smoothed away, lest it confuse anyone, or, worse, played up in little stereotypical moments to confirm some pre-conceived sense of time and place for their intended overseas audience.
While it can sound insular to complain about this, I’ve also grown weary of the trend for English and American characters to pop up in what seems like every other Irish-set drama for no clear creative reason, their presence immediately triggering suspicions that it is designed to placate some commissioner or financier in London or Los Angeles. You start to wonder about what other compromises have been made behind the scenes.
These are problems Irish language cinema might like to have, but it hasn’t got them right now. As TG4 director-general Alan Esslemont told me last October, “you’re not going to get Warner Bros to straight off invest in the Irish language”.
The point of Cine4 is to ensure there is at least some formal source of funding and a pathway for writers, directors and producers to get their films made. “If it wasn’t us that did it, no one was going to do it,” said Esslemont, who initially approached Screen Ireland about setting up the scheme out of his belief that high-prestige cinema should be an element of “status planning” for the Irish language — in essence, a means to preserve it.
He was speaking just as Cine4′s visceral famine thriller Arracht was arriving in cinemas, taking €164,000 between Covid waves. Two months earlier, at the virtual launch of TG4′s new season of programming, representatives of the public service broadcaster had been bursting with pride about this imminent big-screen release and the pipeline of Cine4 projects that was to come.
Derbhile Ní Churraighín, a TG4 commissioning editor, described the trio of funding partners as “a magic triangle that we can’t do without” and said TG4 could “live in hope” of realising an ambition it has been open about since the establishment of Cine4: an Oscar nomination for best international feature film.
That category is highly competitive. There were entries from 93 countries for the most recent academy awards, and neither Arracht nor Foscadh, the two Cine4 features put forward for the 2021 and 2022 ceremonies, made their respective shortlists, which were then whittled down to five nominations. Indeed, many brilliant and otherwise much-garlanded films do not make the cut.
But the target is hardly a wild one, and it’s nice to think that sooner rather than later that Cine4 will have Government ministers issuing ecstatic press releases congratulating Irish language filmmakers for representing Ireland on this particular world stage.
For sure, not every Cine4 film will win the degree of critical acclaim or cut-through with the public that An Cailín Ciúin has done. That’s the way the creative industries work. But this film’s remarkable success should nevertheless serve as proof-of-concept, if one was needed, for the Cine4 scheme and strengthen arguments in favour of increased funding for Irish screen production more widely.
Honestly, the 1980s set design alone is worth the price of admission.
