Coming Home (1978): Characters and Context

Coming Home was a film that spoke to an America just coming to grips with the lasting effects of the Vietnam war. Though filmed in the late seventies, Coming Home takes places in 1968, a year that was marked by not only the escalating conflict in Vietnam, but also political and social turmoil within the...

The Sapphires: a glimpse of Australia’s Stolen Generations

The Sapphires (2012). Directed by Wayne Blair, written by Keith Thompson and Tony Briggs, based on the 2004 stage play of the same name. The Sapphires is a 2012 musical comedy-drama that tells the story of an Aboriginal all-girl group in 1960’s New South Wales. Growing up on a reserve in Western Australia, sisters Gail,...

The Marvellous Ms. Loden: from blonde bombshell to ground-breaking independent filmmaker

"I don't want to get into the system as it exists. I want to create my own corner. It all comes down to this, if you don't want to be a part of what exists, you've got to create your own reason for existence." (Barbara Loden, quoted in You Must Remember This) Barbara Loden was...

Searching for justice for the Lost Girls

Lost Girls (Netflix, 2020). Directed by Liz Garbus, screenplay by Michael Werwie, based on the book Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker.   Late one night in May 2010, a young woman made a frantic call to 911. She was calling from Oak Beach, an affluent residential area in rural Long Island. Visibly distressed, she...

Love & Friendship in A Date for Mad Mary

A Date for Mad Mary. Element Pictures, 2016. Directed by Darren Thornton. Screenplay by Darren Thornton and Colin Thornton. Produced by Ed Guiney and Juliette Bonass. Adapted from the one-woman play 10 Dates with Mad Mary (2010) by Yasmine Akram. Starring: Seána Kerslake, Tara Lee, Charleigh Bailey, Denise McCormack, Siobhan Shanahan. [Image: scannain.com]  Darren Thornton’s...

The lonely city in The Visitor by Maeve Brennan

About halfway through Maeve Brennan’s novella The Visitor, the author comments on the two worlds that exist within the landscape of a city. She distinguishes these two worlds by describing them as, the one with walls around it, meaning the private interior world of the home, and the one with people around it, which is the public...

The victim’s voice in Netflix’s Unbelievable

Lynnwood, Washington, 2008: a young woman named Marie Adler (Kaitlyn Dever) awakes to find an intruder in her apartment. The masked man ties her up and rapes her. The next morning Marie reports her assault to the police. After submitting to a physical examination, and repeating an account of her sexual assault several times, the...

Maeve Brennan: Ireland’s greatest forgotten writer

“Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness."   The above quote is from Maeve Brennan's novella The Visitor and was my first introduction to her. I discovered...

A look at youth culture in Irish film and television: 2003-2017

In 2016-17, I completed an MA in English, specialising in Irish Writing and Film, at University College Cork. As part of the course, everyone in my class was required to set up and regularly update a blog. The idea of the blog initially filled my classmates and me with dread, as blogging was completely uncharted territory for...

Dark summer: trauma and grief in Ari Aster’s Midsommar

In this article, I will look at how Ari Aster’s 2019 folk-horror film Midsommar explores the effects of repressed grief and trauma. I went to see the film in July and found it to be one of the most intriguing and deeply disturbing films that I have ever seen. First of all, I would strongly encourage anyone...