How Ireland Got Its First-Ever International-Feature Oscar Nomination

I’m not the first person to tell the Quiet Girl director Colm Bairéad that his film, now a best-international-feature Oscar nominee, wrecked me. “I’m never sure whether to apologize to people who have that experience,” Bairéad admits. 

But he’s also been there. The first time he read “Foster,” the story by Claire Keegan on which the movie is based, he too was reduced to tears. 

In The Quiet Girl, set in 1981, Cáit (Catherine Clinch) goes to spend a summer with her distant relatives away from her pregnant mother, disinterested father, and the rest of her large family that sees her as an outsider for how she retreats into herself. Embraced by the older, childless couple who are now her surrogate parents (Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett), Cáit starts to emerge from her shell. And then she must go home. 

The Irish director’s film is mostly a faithful adaptation, but he made one key change. While Foster is written in English, The Quiet Girl is in the Irish language, and has become the first in the language ever nominated for an Oscar. Keegan, Bairéad says, never questioned the decision to translate it. 

“For me the reason it’s particularly apt is that this story offers a portrait of us, I think, as a people in terms of our emotional and psychological makeup that feels so authentic and truthful and relatable,” he says. “Irish audiences have flocked to this film and really feel like they know these characters. It’s almost like a family album for people. They feel like they lived this Ireland.” 

The decision to use the Irish language was both practical and personal. Screen Ireland and the broadcaster TG4 have been making a concerted effort to invest in projects that use the language, which Bairéad says is rarely used in the country outside of classrooms. “Even though it’s taught in school, it’s a mandatory subject, most people leave school and they can’t really speak it because they don’t see it as this living language around them,” he explains. 

Bairéad, however, grew up with Irish. His dad is a linguist who raised Bairéad bilingually and established an Irish-language school in their Dublin community. “My dad’s never spoken English to me,” he says. Now Bairéad and his wife, Cleona Ní Chrualaoi, also a producer on The Quiet Girl, are raising their two children in a similar manner. 

Still, the use of Irish made it difficult to find someone to play Cáit. The search took seven months and Bairéad and his team held hundreds of open auditions even before the COVID lockdown, when they resorted to watching tapes of the young actors. Then he saw Clinch, who was 10 during her audition and 11 by the time filming began. “She just had this innate understanding of the character,” he says. “She understood that this was someone who had learned to shut herself down in a way, emotionally, and had this beautiful guarded vulnerability to her.” Clinch had never acted in front of a camera before, but took to it naturally, viewing her character almost as a sister. 

Mimicking Keegan’s prose, which is written in the first person, Bairéad wanted to stick with Cáit’s perspective throughout the film. “To me, it was always a question of situating the audience in the shoes of this young person and trusting in the fact that an audience is going to remember what it feels like to be a child or what it feels like to be in an unfamiliar place or to be scared or confused or to not understand these adult figures in your life or not quite understand certain interactions that you observe,” he says.