An Cailín Ciúin took seven months to cast. Producer Cleona Ní Chrualaoí and director Colm Bairéad were searching for more than just a young actor. They were searching for a young person who could act successfully in Irish in a part that required very little speech. The twelve-year-old girl they eventually located had never been on camera before, and her performance would go down in history as some of the best in that year’s European cinema. Before An Cailín Ciúin debuted at the Berlinale in February 2022, hardly nobody outside of Ireland had heard of Irish-language cinema, thus the only way to explain what transpired next is to point to the movie itself.
Even yet, the figures are still a little shocking. A €1.2 million film that was produced entirely in a minority language that is spoken every day by about 20,000 native speakers went on to make about $7 million worldwide. It was practically unprecedented for a domestic production to run for 22 weeks straight in Irish theaters. It was the first Irish-language movie ever to earn more than €1 million at the box office in both Ireland and the UK, as well as the first to be nominated and shortlisted for an Academy Award. The Banshees of Inisherin and Everything Everywhere All at Once were among its rivals at the Oscars that year. Even those who created it were amazed by how well it held its own.
The Cine4 project, a financial initiative developed through a partnership between Screen Ireland, the Irish public broadcaster TG4, and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland expressly to support feature films shot in Irish, was what structurally enabled An Cailín Ciúin. Prior to Cine4, there was no consistent production or distribution pipeline, hence Irish-language films were produced seldom. This was altered by the plan, which doubled the number of Irish-language movies produced each year prior to the start of An Cailín Ciúin. According to TG4’s Director General Alan Esslemont, the stated goal was clear: to develop a new cinematic universe for Irish-language viewers and, eventually, to win an Oscar for an Irish-language film, even though this appeared lofty at the time. The goal was accomplished more quickly than the scheme’s designers had anticipated.
The awards tale, which is noteworthy enough on its own, is not the only aspect of the movie’s reception that is truly intriguing. It’s how foreign viewers reacted to a film with a very limited budget, a first-time feature director, and a setting in rural 1980s Ireland that was totally spoken in a language that most of them had never heard. The narrative, which centers on a quiet, neglected child from a big, chaotic family spending a summer with relatives who genuinely care about her, is straightforward in the same way that the best stories are straightforward. Understanding doesn’t require knowledge of Irish culture or the Irish language. From page to screen, from English source material to Irish-language expression, Bairéad’s adaptation of Claire Keegan’s short novel Foster created a film that viewers in Japan, France, Australia, and the US felt entirely relatable.
Welsh is a parallel that frequently comes up while talking about the current state of Irish-language film. Hedd Wyn was nominated for an Oscar in 1993, decades before Welsh-language television had established the kind of institutional support that TG4 currently offers for Irish production. Wales experienced a similar, if delayed, reckoning with its minority-language film legacy. Infrastructure makes a difference. Since 1996, TG4 has been commissioning Irish-language drama and documentaries, progressively developing a talent pipeline of actors, directors, writers, and cinematographers who are fluent in the language. A Cailín Ciúin did not appear out of thin air. It came out of a system that had been developing for 25 years and just so happened to create something remarkable enough to simultaneously reach a worldwide audience.
