Small Things Like These

Tim Mielants' Small Things Like These opened the 2024 Berlinale, the first Irish film ever to receive the festival-opening slot. The film is adapted by Enda Walsh — the Irish playwright behind Once and Steve McQueen's Hunger — from Claire Keegan's slim 2021 novella, which had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and become an international bestseller in over thirty languages.

Cillian Murphy plays the lead and produced the film through his Big Things Films company alongside Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Artists Equity. It was Murphy's first project after winning the Best Actor Academy Award for Oppenheimer, and the production was deliberately structured around his post-Oscar availability and the small Irish-language scale of the source material. The supporting cast includes Emily Watson, Eileen Walsh, Michelle Fairley and Helen Behan; Watson would earn a Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance at Berlin for her role.

The film is set in 1985 and addresses the institutional cruelty of the Magdalene laundries, the Catholic-run workhouses for unmarried mothers and other women that operated in Ireland from the eighteenth century until the last laundry's closure in 1996. The Irish state issued a formal apology in 2013 following the McAleese Report; this film is now widely cited, alongside The Magdalene Sisters and Philomena, as one of the major narrative engagements with the subject in cinema.