The Quiet Girl

Colm Bairéad's The Quiet Girl (Irish: An Cailín Ciúin) earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film at the 95th ceremony in March 2023 — the first ever Oscar nomination for an Irish-language production, an extraordinary recognition for a film made principally in a language with under eighty thousand fluent native speakers. The film won the Grand Prix in the Generation Kplus competition at Berlin 2022, the IFTA for Best Film, and was widely treated as the most acclaimed Irish-language film ever made.

The film is adapted from Claire Keegan's 2010 novella Foster — a slim sixty-page work originally published in The New Yorker and later as a stand-alone Faber edition in 2010. Keegan's prose style had become the subject of substantial international literary recognition by the time of the adaptation, and her later novella Small Things Like These (2021) would also be adapted to film by Tim Mielants in 2024.

The cast is led by the breakthrough child performance of Catherine Clinch, with Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett as the foster parents and Michael Patric and Kate Nic Chonaonaigh as the biological parents; almost the entire cast performs in Irish. Cinematography is by Kate McCullough, working in Academy ratio (4:3) on a deliberately restrained palette. The film was made on a budget of approximately €1.4 million through Inscéal Productions, with funding from Screen Ireland and TG4, the Irish-language broadcaster. It became one of the highest-grossing Irish-language films at the domestic box office and led directly to renewed industry investment in Gaeltacht-set productions.