13/08/2024 - We met with the Irish director whose latest film, starring two amazing female characters, is about inherited trauma and how we deal with it

(© M Martegani/Locarno Film Festival)

The first-ever Irish-language horror film, Fréwaka [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Aislinn Clarke
film profile] by Aislinn Clarke, which has celebrated its world premiere Out of Competition at the Locarno Film Festival, is about the open wounds of Ireland and the consequences of trauma we inherited from our ancestors. Cineuropa talked with the director about her relationship with genre cinema and what inspired her when creating her characters.  

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Cineuropa: Where does your passion for genre cinema and more specifically horror cinema come from?
Aislinn Clarke: I was brought up watching horror movies. When I was a child, on Friday nights, I rented video tapes and watched horror movies. Very early on, they became an escape because I was quite an anxious kid, frightened of everything, the real world was scary, it was too chaotic. On the contrary, horror movies created kind of a controlled world because even the horrific thing happening there could be understood. For me, they became a comfort blanket. It was comforting to watch all these strange things. That being said, I would not say that I will only do horror films, but I tend to enhance the dark side of things. I will do more horror films but they might not be the only thing.

Have you ever been afraid of being categorised as a horror director?
There is some snobbery about the genre among people who are film fans more widely. They put horror movies in categories: there are elevated horror, good ones and bad ones, something that they don’t do with other genres like comedy, for example. Personally, I don’t want to be categorised as a horror director solely because I don’t think that it is the only thing that I will ever do. For me, it’s about the story, the way I approach the world and whether or not I think I can do something tangible with the story I have in mind. That is the thing that comes first for me rather than the genre. It would be strange to align myself, like a lifestyle, to a particular genre. 

Trauma and the difficulty of talking about it and sharing it are at the heart of the film. Do you really believe that Ireland’s dark past influences the subconscious of its inhabitants, even the younger generations like Shoo's?
I don’t want to be too negative about that, but I think that it’s almost impossible to escape the trauma in our history, there is so much of it that it is passed on. There’s actually research saying that it is passed on physically, it is tangible in a physical sense, but also psychologically, subconsciously. It’s such a big part of Irish identity, the reason of its sadness. It’s really hard to escape that. Thinking and talking about our own traumas is really useful, but it is also something very difficult to face. Historically, there has been an Irish compulsion to be holding the darkness and sadness inside and showing to the world a clown face, the face the world wants to see.

In this sense, talking about the identity of Ireland, why did you decide to make your film in Irish?
Actually, it’s very simple. I had written a film in Irish that I didn’t direct, and then the same production company asked me if I wanted to direct an Irish language horror movie and I thought that it could be really interesting. In addition to that, I was brought up with the Irish language and it felt like a natural thing to do. Once I accepted the proposition, I thought about what would be the best way of using Irish: what am I talking about? What is important in terms of our Irishness, our history and our future? In the film, we have two characters, Peig and Shoo, who represent two very different types of Ireland.     

What I particularly like about the film is the rudeness the protagonists allow themselves, the “anti-feminine” behaviour they adopt. Can you tell us something more about this aspect of the film?
I decided pretty early on that I wanted to tell a story from the perspective of two Irish women who have their own huge inherited traumas. That said, I didn’t want to perpetuate any expectation about gender norms in particular. But this is also my own experience of women in Ireland. To me, Peig feels really much like a person I know, who is kind of spiky and funny. A lot of Irish women are very polite in public but, internally, they are screaming, they are funny, irreverent and sometimes rude and it is so refreshing. I didn’t want to perpetuate the idea of a polite old woman, she’s absolutely not like that and it’s not her job to be so. The idea was to be truthful to the characters, that I can believe in them.