Colm Bairéad’s appearance at Deadline’s Contenders: The Nominees event marks a year since his film The Quiet Girl first debuted at the Berlin Film Festival.
A dual release in the UK and Ireland followed in May, and a slow international rollout has kept the director busy ever since.
Indeed, as the film’s Oscar campaign enters the final stretch, The Quiet Girl is only now going wide across America: not bad going for a film with no stars that’s shot almost entirely in Irish, a language spoken by fewer than 2 million people worldwide.
The story of a shy and sensitive pre-teen girl who is sent to live with relatives after she becomes too much of a burden to her parents, who are expecting another child, The Quiet Girl is adapted from Claire Keegan’s novella Foster, which Bairéad discovered, quite by chance, in 2018. RELATED: Contenders Film: The Nominees – Deadline’s Full Coverage “It was listed in an article in The Irish Times as one of the greatest works of Irish literature written by a woman this century,” he recalls. “For whatever reason, I went out that day and bought it, and I just fell head over heels in love with it.
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