FRÉWAKA
Saturday, March 1 • 8:45 PM • T1
Q&A with filmmaker Aislinn Clarke, moderated by Mary Turkot, CIFF Assistant Producer.
Dramatic Feature | Irish Language | Award Winner | Woman Director
Still reeling from the death of her mother, Shoo (Clare Monnelly, DOINEANN) is assigned to be the live-in caregiver for recent stroke survivor Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN). Shoo moves into Peig’s remote village home expecting to care for an ailing woman but instead finds one profoundly troubled by the supposed demonic forces in her basement. But what at first seems to be the ravings of a superstitious old woman soon prove prescient as Shoo starts to lose her grip on reality and give in to Peig’s paranoid delusions. Filmmaker Aislinn Clarke’s (THE DEVIL’S DOORWAY) Irish-language sophomore feature firmly establishes her as a master of horror, as she deftly mines Irish history and folklore to craft a deeply unsettling and utterly terrifying story of generational trauma. (Note courtesy AFI European Union Film Showcase.) Official Selection, 2024 AFI European Union Film Showcase, Locarno and London film festivals.
DIR/SCR Aislinn Clarke; PROD Diarmuid Lavery. Ireland, 2024, color, 103 min. In English and Irish with English subtitles. NOT RATED
AWARDS: Best Original Music - Catalonian FIlm Fest 2024
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Aislinn Clarke is an Irish Writer/Director. She holds the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Gold Fellowship for Women 2020. Her debut feature film The Devil’s Doorway was released in the USA by IFC Midnight in 2018. The film premiered in the Official Competition at the Seattle International Film Festival and had its European premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh, where Aislinn was nominated for the Bingham Ray New Talent Award. The film played at many of the premier horror film festivals worldwide (Frightfest, Sitges etc). She was nominated for Screen International’s Rising Genre Star Award at Fright fest. She has been described as a “real genre talent” by noted British genre critic Kim Newman and as “one of the most brilliant directors ever” by Oscar-nominated director Lexi Alexander (The Punisher and Green Room). Fréwaka will be her first horror feature in the Irish language.
Mary Turkot has been the Assistant Producer of CIFF for two years, as well as the Website & Digital Content Manager for Solas Nua. She is a fiction writer, poet, and recent Georgetown University English M.A. graduate ('23), where she worked as the Program Assistant for the Global Irish Studies Initiative for two years. She coordinated multiple academic conferences and public events with visiting Irish authors and scholars during her time at Georgetown. She also facilitated the addition of the first Global Irish Studies Fellowship into the Initiative’s programming. Her work has been featured in Rutgers University literary magazine The Anthologist and on poets.org by the Academy of American Poets. Her poem, "Brigantine, New Jersey," won the 2021 Enid Dame Memorial Poetry Prize.
The Capital Irish Film Festival is supported by the Government of Ireland Emigrant Support Programme, Culture Ireland, Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland, Embassy of Ireland, Northern Ireland Bureau, Northern Ireland Screen, and the Irish Film Institute’s IFI International Programme supported by Culture Ireland. Solas Nua is supported by the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities.
