Young Irish director Norah Mc Gettigan tells Michael Dwyer about learning her craft in Poland and screening with the best in Cannes
In the 58-year history of the Cannes Film Festival, only one Irish-made feature by an Irish director has been selected for competition - Pat O'Connor's Cal, which won the best actress award for Helen Mirren in 1984.
The only other Irish director to get a film into competition at Cannes has been Neil Jordan, whose London-set Mona Lisa took the best actor award for Bob Hoskins in 1986.
It is all the more remarkable, then, that Irish writer-director Norah Mc Gettigan has had two short films shown in competition at Cannes in the official Cinefondation section - The Water Fight in 2003 and A Song For Rebecca, which was screened at Cannes last week. It was one of 18 films selected from more than 1,000 entries submitted by film schools around the world.
Mc Gettigan also has the distinction of being the first Irish film student accepted at the renowned Lodz Film School in Poland, the alma mater for such great Polish filmmakers as Roman Polanski, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Andrzej Wajda. The Water Fight, which she made in her second year at Lodz, won the Roman Polanski Award for best film produced at the college that year.
A native of Lough Eske near Donegal town, her first interest was in theatre and she graduated in theatre studies from the University of Ulster in Coleraine. "I went through the usual post-university year of not knowing what to do," she said when we talked in Cannes last week. "I went to Hungary for a year and taught English. I wanted to go back there for another year, but the University of Ulster has a partnership with the University of Lodz, where the film school is. My theatre professor in Coleraine told me there was a job opening where I could teach English and also do some drama studies in English. I spent 1998 in Lodz and thought I might try my hand at the film course."
Her four-year film course has just ended with the production of A Song For Rebecca, her graduation film, in which a young woman, Laura, returns to her Donegal island home for the funeral of her best friend, Rebecca, who committed suicide. The emotional wake in a local pub coincides with the arrival of a stag party on the island, and Laura has a chance encounter with the groom-to-be, a young Norwegian about to marry an Irishwoman.
IT'S AN ASSURED and atmospheric film achieved with a keen sense of visual style, and with a notably strong central portrayal of Laura by Gemma Doorly, who has a recurring role as Sarah, the sandwich bar assistant in Fair City and who was a fellow student of Mc Gettigan at Coleraine. The crew is composed of students from Lodz, most of them Polish.
"The Poles loved it in Ireland," Mc Gettigan says. "I had a much bigger crew this time than when I made The Water Fight, and when you're all close together in a small area, it gets very emotional towards the end. It was a tough shoot. I was very demanding of Gemma, who did a really great job. I made her stand for ages in freezing cold water."
She shot the film on the island of Arranmore, with some scenes filmed on Tory Island. "Everything is mixed up - the church is on Tory and the graveyard is on Arranmore," she says. "The people on the two islands are going to think it's very confusing when they see it."
The film runs for 45 minutes, somewhere between the running time of an average short film and a feature. "They asked me at the film school if I wanted to make it as a feature," she says, "but this is not a big story. I did want to make it longer than the usual short purely to practice. I will make a feature soon, but I didn't want to arrive at one without being prepared for it."
SHE HAS NOTHING but happy memories of her time in Lodz, the biggest city in Poland after Warsaw, although there were some early language problems. "The first year for foreigners, you don't understand anything," she says. "You're really lost. The language is difficult at first, but then you find yourself picking it up very easily. I don't know what it's like at other film schools, but in Lodz, the professors are really honest. If they think something is crap, they'll tell you. It takes a lot of getting used to, but it's good preparation to get that kind of honesty, and when you get a pat on the back, you know you've deserved it.
"Polish people are quite like Irish people, especially the young people. They're jolly and into contact, but they can still remember the communist era and there is still a lot of bureaucracy there. If you want to get something from the library, you have to go one place to get a piece of paper and somewhere else to get it stamped. You get used to it."
Now 28, Mc Gettigan is about to work as assistant director to Andrzej Seweryn, a well-established Polish theatre and film actor who has lived in Paris for 25 years.
"He's going to direct his first film, which will be shot in Poland, and his producer has asked me to assist on it," she says. "We're doing that in the autumn, and then I would like to do my first feature. I am going to start working on it in Poland, but I would like to shoot it in Dublin. It's very much a film about young people in Dublin today."