Small Things Like These

Tim Mielants' Small Things Like These opened the 2024 Berlinale, the first Irish film ever given the festival's opening slot. Enda Walsh (the Irish playwright behind Once and Steve McQueen's Hunger) adapted it 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 with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Artists Equity. It was his first project after winning the Best Actor Academy Award for Oppenheimer, and the production was deliberately built around his post-Oscar availability and the small, intimate scale of the source material. Emily Watson, Eileen Walsh, Michelle Fairley and Helen Behan lead the supporting cast, and Watson went on to win a Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance at Berlin for her role.

The film is set in 1985 and deals with 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 of them closed in 1996. The Irish state issued a formal apology in 2013 following the McAleese Report. Alongside The Magdalene Sisters and Philomena, it is one of the major fictional treatments of the subject that cinema has produced.