21/11/2024 - The Irish artist and filmmaker talks about turning a critical lens on her mother and herself in her first feature-length documentary

Hailing from Donegal, debuting Irish filmmaker Myrid Carten delivers a powerful and enduring gut-punch with the immensely personal documentary A Want in Her [+see also:
film review
interview: Myrid Carten
film profile], which tracks the ripple effects of her mother’s multifaceted addiction and mental-health struggles. Cineuropa spoke to Carten on the occasion of the film’s premiere in IDFA’s International Competition.

Cineuropa: To start with, I have a pragmatic question to unpack your process because of the many layers of archive and footage you deal with. What did it look like sifting through this from a logistical and emotional standpoint?
Myrid Carten: The word you use, “sifting”, is quite good. It was almost like an excavation, of sorts. I started from where I was at and what was happening in the present tense, which was that this drama started to unfold in front of my camera. […] My mother started to have this crisis, so the project started to expand. The locus was the house, and the footage was going to be the sort of cinéma vérité footage, the observational stuff with my family, and then some more visceral, abstract sequences that brought the character of the house and the landscapes to life. That's what I thought was the language of the film.

In what ways did you move away from this approach?
I was working with an amazing filmmaker who was going to be my editor, Sabine Groenewegen. I mentioned to her that I had these tapes from when I was a kid, and she was like, “Let's watch them.” So, we watched them together on Zoom, all four hours of them. It actually looks like there's more, but I think I was given four tapes as a child, and that was it. What was frustrating was that there would be some of the adults, in my mother’s footage, where we thought, “Oh, this is great.” Then it would just cut out because they’d been taped over.

Then it expanded again to my artworks that I'd made at Goldsmiths ten years ago. I did get to a point where I was thinking, “Is there any footage in my past that isn't going to get into this film? Where do we draw the line?” The archive was the hardest stuff to integrate because it had its own texture. […] There was a lot of navigating of how we would bring in this material without the chronology being confusing for people, because obviously, my mother looks better then. That’s why we had to start shooting [the footage playing] on screens and monitors to try to give a sense of distance from it.

As there is so much of your own personal and childhood-era footage in the film, do you feel like your work is also an investigation of yourself?
There's no easy answer. I actually had to get some distance from the character on screen. There was a stage in the edit where we started calling me “MC”, my initials, so that we were able to talk about her in the third person, which some people think is a bit weird. Vivian Gornick, whom I love, talks about this in her book The Art of Personal Narrative, about how you have to have a persona who's almost like a distilled version of yourself. […] And there was this constant negotiation of how to put me in. I really didn't want to do a voice-over. […] I hadn't seen those tapes in 15 years. My father actually discovered them and got them digitised for me about a year before I started the film. I didn't remember shooting any of my family when I was younger. I remembered all the little plays [I did], and I think then, you have a bit more compassion for yourself.

There are some striking scenes where you seem to confront your mother – or perhaps “confront” is not the right word, as the dynamic shifts. Was there any particular pretext for these scenes?
“Confront” is a good word. That stage of filming was probably the longest phase I had in one go, which wasn't very long. It was like ten days. I think I was just underslept, and I was at the end of my tether. It wasn’t premeditated, but it is a version of various fights we've had in the past. It's one of my patterns. My old pattern as I grew up would have been to disvalue and downplay how it was affecting me so that she would feel less guilty. Then I went the other way, and I played the other role as this strict parent who tells her off. […] But I never wanted to put that fight into the film as a “gotcha” moment.

At the same time, I'm not trying to validate what I said either. I think that rage, anger and frustration are very real. It was just a good example of how I can react in ways that aren't always the most helpful. I really tried to do that in the film. I tried to show my own mistakes, and they're very human mistakes. I don't condone myself for it, but I also recognise I don't want to get stuck in that either. That was more the reason for putting it in, because I think both things are true – people are often powerless over their issues, but there are ways in which we can make excuses for it as well. It's a really difficult balance, and I'm just as culpable of that as other people in the film are.