Trish McAdam, Director of Songs Of Blood And Destiny

Ahead of its screening at the Kerry Film Festival, Gemma Creagh talks to Trish McAdam, Director of Songs Of Blood And Destiny.
Based on the epic poem, iGirl, by Marina Carr. A narrator unravels her own life like some knotted ball of string, reflects with dark humour and heavenly wit on humanities destiny and evokes voices past and future.
​
The filmmaker takes the semi-autobiographic words of Marina Carr’s epic poem, as if they were her own, encouraging the audience to do the same. Using her unique visual language, the filmmaker mirrors the slippery nature of Carr’s work, fire, earth, air, water, crash and bump, contradictory truths told by a dynamic troupe of actors, banging on the forth wall. Visuals untangle, re-tangle in multi-layered collages to augment performances of Eileen Walsh, Cathy Belton, Brian Gleeson, Brian Quinn and new-comers Ella Lilly Hyland and Holly Sturton.

The present day narrator is curious, funny but unforgiving, evoking voices, past and future. Joan of Arc, the warrior, Antigone, the truth teller, and the incestuous Jocasta and her son Oedipus, victims of homosapiens tragic fate of our own making. Looking forward from our contemporary, messy domesticity, back to the extinction of the Neanderthals, the film reminds us of the potential extinction of the planet, and ourselves, driven by our very desire to avoid it, fuelled by sci-fi fantasies of somewhere better in the beyond, transhumants of the future.

Composer: Paddy Mulcahy: Casting Director: Maureen Hughes Production Manager Grace Sexton, Studio shoot Cinematographer Fiona Graham, Anna O’Carroll camera operator, Sound Peter Nicell, Hair, Makeup Sarah O’Rourke, Edited with Connie Farrell in Oughterard, Post Production Gorilla Post. Niche Films would like to acknowledge the support of The Arts Council | and Cliona Maher as producer for An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Clonmel Junction Arts Festival.

Songs Of Blood And Destiny screens on Friday 20th October as part of the at the Kerry Film Festival (19-22 October 2023.

https://kerryfilmfestival.com/

https://filmireland.net/