It’s not uncommon for an Irish film to be nominated for an Oscar. Last year it was Belfast, which was in the running for best film. In 2019, Three ads on the outskirts. In 2018, The Favorite. The difference is that this time Irish cinema opens in a category that until now was alien to it, that of the foreign language film. The quiet girl, or An cailín ciúin, is the first film shot in the Irish language to reach the Oscars in its entire history.
The film, based on a short novel by Claire Keegan (published in Spanish by Eterna Cadencia and in Catalan by Minúscula), has been a notable success with audiences both inside and outside the country and, beyond that, has become a standard of a revival of the Irish language used as a language of culture, and not as a folklore stronghold.
“Making a film in the Irish language was considered a sure commercial flop and it was a risk no one was taking. That ceiling has now been broken, or perhaps our film has shown that that ceiling does not exist, ”congratulates the director, Colm Bairéad, from Los Angeles, where he is campaigning for the film. In a context in which subtitles are used even to watch movies (and videos on social networks) in their own language and the platforms, led by Netflix, have popularized content in different languages, distributing a film in a minority language is no longer seems like an exercise in eccentricity, even for English speakers.
Bairéad, who has spent most of his filmmaking career in Irish, considers himself “the product of previous generations of language agitation and activism.” Both he and his wife, the film’s producer Cleona Ní Chrualaoí, belong to the small group of Dubliners who use Irish – it is not entirely correct to call it “Gaelic”, because Gaelic also includes Scottish – as their main language, also with their daughters, who are going to school in that language, just like they did.
Although all the inhabitants of the Republic, and also the students of Catholic schools in Northern Ireland, take the compulsory subject from childhood, there are only about 75,000 speakers who use it daily among the seven million inhabitants of the island, and they are concentrated in the so-called Gaeltacht, in mostly rural areas.
In the film, the girl protagonist, Cait, has a violent and alcoholic father who speaks only English, while the sisters use Irish as a way of maintaining a secret code and a safe space. The metaphor draws itself: it is not easy for a hyper-minority language to coexist with another that serves to make the world go round.
For the journalist and writer Una Mullally, speaking Irish “has stopped being a shame and has become a source of pride”, and she assures that many of her friends in their 20s and 30s are learning it. “Previous generations wanted to escape the visual and verbal signifiers of Irishness, and saw the country’s language and aesthetics as outdated and embarrassing, that’s a natural reaction in a country that was colonized.”
She, too, belongs to that strange breed, the Irish-speaking Dubliner. In her case, not because of family inheritance, but because at the age of 12 she was educated at Coláiste Íosagáin, where everything is taught in that language, and she had to quickly learn the idiolect of her classmates, an Irish truffled with adolescent slang that served them to form a kind of secret club within the capital. Although Mullally writes his influential columns for The Irish Times in English, he has hosted shows in Irish – the public channel TG4 broadcasts only in that language – and sees himself as part of a Celtic cultural revival that includes hip hop bands like the feisty Kneecap trio. , from Belfast and with a tendency to get into trouble because of his ski mask with the tricolor flag and the clear anti-British message of his songs, neofolk groups like Lakum or The Scratch and the rapper Selló, who practices Irish Drill, a sound that vindicates Afro-descendant Ireland. The fashionable actor, Paul Mescal, raised multilingual sighs a few weeks ago when a video of him answering in Irish on a red carpet went viral. And on Tik Tok there are creators like Séaghan Ó Súilleabháin (@kerrycowboy) generating content in the language of his ancestors.
Mullally does not believe that this facelift of the language goes against the traditional image that prevailed in the country itself. In 2020, the writer Manchán Magan had significant publishing success with a short book called 32 words for field that collected Irish words with origins in nature and meanings between mystics and magic. Scim, for example, means “small layer of particles” but also “succumb to the supernatural world through sleep.” “I don’t think the language is losing its sense of folklore or its antiquity. On the contrary, I think it’s what attracts people, and not because of some strange ethnonationalist reflex. Ireland is a progressive country”, reflects the journalist, who connects this revival with the process of emancipation from the Catholic Church that the country has also been experiencing for decades.
It escapes no one that An Cailín Ciúin is not the only Irish film with a presence this year at the Oscars. The other film, Banshee in Inisherin, plays in another league. It sits at the senior table, with nine nominations, including best picture. Many Irish people, including writer Mark O’Connell, who published an article stoning the film in the US media outlet Slate, believe that Inisherin’s director Martin McDonagh, born in London to Irish parents, has made a career of exploiting clichés about filmmaking. island that Americans like. Bairéad seems to be alluding to this when he says: “The most interesting films that have come out of our country in recent years have been in Irish. They feel authentically ours and they are not appealing to a foreign idea of ????the Irish”.
Mullally also points out: “The first time I saw The quiet girl I was surprised by the way in which the language contributed to the aesthetics of the film. The tone of the film is very much in sync with the Irish language, which is descriptive, poetic and pays attention to detail. Pastiches and clichés about Ireland are an easy sell, especially to Irish-Americans, but scenery and cartoons are no substitute for the real thing.” On Monday the question of which of the two Irelands prevails in Hollywood will be cleared up.
