The Quiet Girl

Colm Bairéad's The Quiet Girl (Irish: An Cailín Ciúin) was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards in March 2023, the first Oscar nomination ever for an Irish-language production, and a remarkable one for a film made principally in a language with fewer than eighty thousand fluent native speakers. It won the Grand Prix in the Generation Kplus competition at Berlin 2022 and the IFTA for Best Film, and no Irish-language film has been more acclaimed.

It is adapted from Claire Keegan's 2010 novella Foster, a slim sixty-page work first published in The New Yorker and then as a stand-alone Faber edition in 2010. By the time of the adaptation Keegan's prose had a large international readership, and her later novella Small Things Like These (2021) was filmed by Tim Mielants in 2024.

Catherine Clinch, in a breakthrough child performance, leads the cast, with Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett as the foster parents and Michael Patric and Kate Nic Chonaonaigh as the biological parents; almost everyone performs in Irish. Kate McCullough shot it in Academy ratio (4:3) on a deliberately restrained palette. Made for approximately €1.4 million through Inscéal Productions, with funding from Screen Ireland and the Irish-language broadcaster TG4, it became one of the highest-grossing Irish-language films at the domestic box office and led directly to new industry investment in Gaeltacht-set productions.