An Cailín Ciúin: ‘We were so blessed. Catherine Clinch was the only one who could play the part’

The adaptation of a Claire Keegan story might be the best Irish film yet. Director Colm Bairéad and actress Catherine Clinch on what makes the award-winning Irish language movie special

Quietly confident: Catherine Clinch had never been on screen until her role in An Cailín Ciúin

Director Colm Bairéad with his wife Cleona Ní Chrualaoí. Photo by Seán Ó Mainnín/Tuairisc.ie

Clinch was so at ease working with Carrie Crowley

Quietly confident: Catherine Clinch had never been on screen until her role in An Cailín Ciúin

Director Colm Bairéad with his wife Cleona Ní Chrualaoí. Photo by Seán Ó Mainnín/Tuairisc.ie

Clinch was so at ease working with Carrie Crowley

Quietly confident: Catherine Clinch had never been on screen until her role in An Cailín Ciúin

Paul Whitington

May 06 2022 12:00 PM

I’m not one for hyperbole, but An Cailín Ciúin may be the best, most complete and satisfying Irish film made yet. Based on the story Foster by Claire Keegan, Colm Bairéad’s quiet, lyrical drama addresses the themes of childhood, grief and loneliness in spare and unsentimental fashion, never mind the fact that its tale is told as Gaeilge.

More than that, it provides an insight into a recent but very different Ireland in which children were numerous and consequently undervalued, sometimes not protected at all. In recent times, there has been much justified criticism of church and state for their historic inhumanity to children. But people were also cruel and indifferent to the needs and sensitivities of the young.

An Cailín Ciúin stars Catherine Clinch as Cáit, a quiet, pensive nine-year-old girl of the title whose home life is not ideal. It’s 1981 and her kind but overwrought mother is expecting yet another child, while her feckless and callow father continues to gamble and drink away any money that comes his way. As the birth looms, Cáit is deemed surplus to requirements and sent to live with her mother’s cousin, Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley).

Eibhlín and her husband Seán (Andrew Bennett) have no children and are strangers to Cáit, who is all at sea in a strange house and might expect the worst. Instead, she finds kindness, calmness and a loving understanding she has never previously experienced. Even Seán, a detached and stoical farmer, warms to the sweet and watchful Cáit, but Seán and Eibhlín are hiding a sad secret the little girl is about to uncover.

Even before its release, An Cailín Ciúin has been showered in garlands, winning awards at the Berlin and Dublin film festivals and Best Film, Director and Actor at the Iftas. Has Bairéad been taken aback by its reception?

“I mean, it’s certainly exceeded our expectations,” he says. “To have gotten into Berlin was a huge deal for us — I think we were the first Irish language feature film ever to have been selected there, and just to be selected felt to us like an enormous honour, and then to actually have won some awards there as well. And then, with the reception we’ve had at the Dublin Film Festival, and the Iftas as well, it’s just been a bit of a whirlwind, the last three months.

“But for me, a large part of all that is testament to what was present in Claire Keegan’s original work, in the story that she told. Obviously there’s a job of work in terms of translating that into a film that works and that connects, but to me it just feels like we’ve been successful in translating the emotional power that Keegan managed to generate in her work.”

He remembers being “floored, profoundly moved” by Keegan’s story Foster the first time he read it.

“Straight away, there was something about her prose that felt innately visual,” he says. “I was coming at it from a film-maker’s perspective and reading it as potential subject matter to adapt, but every image and every beat of the story just felt more adaptable. I could just see the film taking shape in my head as I was reading it.

“But really, it was the emotional aspect, particularly how it ends, and I think this is the effect the film is having on people as well — if ever there was a story that’s all about the ending, it’s this one. I was in floods of tears reading the book and so, for me, the challenge was how do I honour this experience that I’ve just had as a reader on screen. The other aspect of it that fascinated me was the sort of silence in the piece and the struggle that we have communicating emotionally as a people.”

Without giving anything away, one of An Cailín Ciúin’s major themes hinges on a painful secret which, though in some ways revealed, is never openly talked about. “And that was really fascinating to me, and such an interesting challenge as a film-maker,” Bairéad says, “how do you take a story that is so unreliant on plot and where things are so unsaid, and it’s all about the subtext. How do you transpose that to a working film that audiences can engage with?”

First, find yourself an exceptional child actress. “We feel so blessed that Catherine came into our lives, to be honest, because she really was the only person I felt could play the part,” Bairéad says. “We had started auditioning pre-Covid, we had open, physical auditions. We didn’t have an actual casting director, it was just myself and the producer, my wife, Cleona Ní Chrualaoí, just to save money.

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“And because we’re Irish speakers, we thought, well we’ll have the ear for someone who has a command of the language and so on. So we naively chose to do it ourselves.

“So we’d started auditions and we were focused particularly on Munster because we were looking for someone with Munster Irish to match the dialect to the setting of where the family live. But then Covid hit, and we threw the net wider and looked for self tapes from all the gaelscoils across the country. Then Catherine’s tape came in and from the first time I saw her, it was really evident that she had what the character needed.”

In a role that requires her to be at the centre of the frame for virtually the entire film, Clinch is quite exceptional as Cáit, the quiet heart of this soulful and ultimately heartbreaking film. “I never thought it would get this much attention,” says Clinch, who is now 12.

“Even when I got the part, I just thought it was this film that a couple of people in Ireland would see, but it’s so crazy that so many people are seeing it and giving such feedback.”

Crazier still is the fact that this is Clinch’s first time on screen. “I’d never been in a film before, but I had done drama classes since I was young,” she says. “When I saw the bit of the script they gave me for the audition, I knew straight away that it was a good story.”

And was it hard getting herself inside the head of a little girl from a very different kind of Ireland? “Not really, because some things with Cáit and me, like our personalities, are actually kind of similar.”

But Catherine found Cáit’s predicament unsettling. “The ways Cáit was treated and some of the things they did, it was quite surprising to me because we’d never do things like that now.”

She found life on a film set quite a challenge. “There was a lot going on, especially because of Covid and stuff, you had to wear masks and they were constantly checking your temperature and stuff, so it was quite stressful.”

Not that you would know it to watch Clinch on the screen.

“Most of the time I just believed in her,” Bairéad says. “I believed that she understood what was happening in the scene, and there were very few times where I’d have to really push her in terms of number of takes or anything like that. She was kind of remarkable, actually. If you were to look at each of the performances, I’d say her number of takes was lower than everyone else’s. But she just sort of has this inner resolve, you know, and an emotional intelligence about her. She just really understood the character.”

In a quiet way, An Cailín Ciúin carries an implicit indictment of a toxic national attitude to childhood. At one point, a neighbour asks Eibhlín if the nine-year-old Cáit “can’t be put to work”.

Director Colm Bairéad with his wife Cleona Ní Chrualaoí. Photo by Seán Ó Mainnín/Tuairisc.ie

“I’m glad you’re picking up on that,” says Bairéad, “because even though the film is not a critique of institutions or anything like that, it’s still, I hope, a film that’s very cognisant of its background, and of the society that was there.

“I became a father only two years before I read Foster for the first time, so again, that difference between how children are treated now versus then just felt so much more pronounced because you’re just wondering how could you think of children in that sense — how could that attitude exist and persist?

“And that was part of the impulse to tell the story, to give a voice to a young child, or girl, from an era when children often didn’t have a voice. There was something about that, about empowering this character that was really appealing to me.”

The essence of Cáit’s fascination as a character is how much she watches, how little she says. But all the time, you can see her thinking.

Clinch was so at ease working with Carrie Crowley

“Yeah, she’s essentially turned all of that stuff inwards, and I think that’s what’s so wonderful about Catherine’s performance,” says Bairéad. “Even though she’s not saying much, you can see that there’s still an extraordinarily active mind and heart inside this girl, and Catherine just manages to channel all that stuff inwards.

“Bur the camera is this X-ray machine, you know — it will always find that.”

An Cailín Ciúin is released next Friday, May 13