By Colm Bairéad
I’m sitting in an airport terminal in LAX, waiting to take a flight to New York. My body feels a little like my laptop battery, currently at 43%. It’s been a busy week but I’m excited by the time I’ve spent in Los Angeles, the people I’ve met, the film I’m here to talk about. It’s called The Quiet Girl, Ireland’s official submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the 95th Academy Awards and I’ve been here drumming up awareness. Missionaries in a foreign land. This journey began four years ago when I first read a slight, unassuming story called Foster and realised, as I wiped hot, childlike tears from my face at its conclusion, that I’d fallen head over heels in love with it. It was written by the Irish author, Claire Keegan, one of the nominees on the Booker Prize shortlist earlier this year.
Now that I think about it, ‘missionary’ is not an entirely facetious moniker for a filmmaker – there’s undoubtedly something of the vocational to that endless drive to bring an idea to light, and to the effort involved in finding its ‘flock’. A film is an idea painted with light, witnessed in the dark, that lingers only as a memory. A kind of ghost: intangible, ephemeral, begging to be believed… and ed. There are films we’ve seen that never leave us, that belong to our deepest inner lives. Foster has now become its own dancing light in the dark as The Quiet Girl and, as with any screen adaptation of a literary work, this film is an act of translation. And an act of faith. As an Irish-language film, there’s also a literal translation taking place too, as Claire’s original was written in English. That said, when I listen to the characters speak in Foster I’m reminded just how much our Hiberno-English is haunted by our indigenous tongue. Ghosts everywhere, it seems.
