CLÍODHNA | Short Film

A young woman facing emigration reflects on her community, landscape, and language revealing a deeper connection to the unseen world around her.

OVERVIEW

A short film exploring the question: What is the true value of language? — with a particular focus on my own endangered mother tongue, Irish.

To lose a language is to lose part of ourselves. our identity, our worldview, and our connection to the world around us. The Irish language holds within it ways of seeing and understanding the world that have evolved over millennia expressed through rich figurative language, myth, and legend.

Inspired by this, I set out to create a story that brings this deeper, often unseen connection into a contemporary setting—where the boundary between our lived reality and a more mystical realm can be traversed through language. It’s through this crossing that we find meaning, belonging, and a profound link to everything that is, was, and is yet to come.

ROLE

Director
Producer
Writer

PRODUCTION

FBF Films
Negative Space Films

TIMELINE

March 2024 — Currently on a festival run

Visually I wanted this film to feel larger than life, otherworldly and do the justice that our goddess of love and beauty deserves. I utilised a lot of static camera shots positioned far away to isolate the protagonist in negative space, to really underline the theme of lonliness, then brought the camera closer and used richer colour to contrast against those moments of relief and catharsis.

I produced this film with a small crew with minimal equipment following a “leave-no-trace” policy to protect the the landcape which we were working on.