The question of how to define and demarcate national Irish cinema has long exercised the field of film studies in Ireland and beyond. Until the late 1970s, most cinematic representations of Ireland issued from the industries of Hollywood and Britain in the absence of an indigenous Irish film industry. The groundbreaking work Cinema and Ireland (Rockett, Gibbons and Hill 1988) articulated some of the debates regarding the constitution of an Irish film and of Irish cinema more generally: should definitions be based on a film’s subject matter, on the nationality of its writer or director, on its location, on funding sources, or on other criteria? Within such debates, it is notable how little attention has been given to Irish-language cinema. Aside from the critical focus on Bob Quinn’s cinematic work of the 70s and 80s and the work of scholars such as Seán Crosson and Tony Tracy, Irish-language cinema has largely been treated as a sub-section of Irish cinema or has seen the language of the film underplayed or disregarded. Prevailing perspectives have tended to view Irish-language film in much the same way as the Irish language itself has been widely represented in recent decades, as bound up with well-trodden or outdated themes and issues relating to tradition, heritage, culture and national identity, seen as of limited relevance or interest to contemporary Irish audiences and of even less interest to global audiences. In her analysis of Irish cinema in the 21^st century, Ruth Barton explains that her critical approach lies

with more recent considerations of the place of “minor” cinemas within a globalised production and consumption environment. Although the case of Irish cinema is fundamentally different to its Danish equivalent, not least because Irish cinema is at once postcolonial and English-language based, Mette Hjort’s identification of Danish cinema as “a cultural site par excellence for the negotiation of globalizing processes” resonates with my own analysis of the Irish position. (2019: 7)

In his own analysis of Irish cinema, however, Martin McLoone contends that as a primarily Anglophone cinema, Irish cinema can suffer in its attempts to compete with “major” (Hollywood) cinema:

Although the native language (Irish Gaelic) is still spoken in small pockets of the country, Ireland reflects its status as a former colony of Britain in the fact that it is now an overwhelmingly English-speaking culture with an Anglophone cinema. […] In this regard, Irish cinema closely resembles the “non-nation-state” cinemas of Wales and Scotland in being peculiarly exposed to the metropolitan industries of London and Hollywood, with which it shares a language. And yet, somewhat ironically, precisely because Irish cinema is Anglophone, there is always the hope that Irish films will break through into the American market, with the consequent danger that production strategies are geared towards that eventuality. […] [T]he temptation is always there to compete with rather than to live with Hollywood cinema and to mould production with the American market in mind. (2007: 60-61)

That “temptation” or challenge within Anglophone Irish cinema relates to a number of factors impacting on the filmmaking landscape from the Celtic Tiger period onwards. As Barton noted in 2004:

In common with the situation in other European countries and small national cinemas, nearly all Irish films receive state subvention. In Ireland, this funding comes mainly via the Irish Film Board/Bord Scannán na hÉireann [now Screen Ireland/Fís Éireann] but most productions are equally reliant on tax breaks (Section 481) and international co-productions for equity. […] For many academics in particular, the commercial exigencies of international funding have resulted in a cinema of compromise. (2004: 108-09)

Writing in the post-Celtic Tiger era, Barton observes that the question of attracting audiences has come more into play and that Irish filmmakers find themselves “much more likely to win audiences if they make films that closely resemble global product” (2019: 3). She also notes that Irish film became more reliant on co-productions following the slashing of state funding in the wake of the economic crash of 2008, while the state, in a bid to rebuild Ireland’s international reputation in the wake of the crash, turned its attention to Irish film as a cultural export, with state funding leaning towards market-oriented productions (2019: 26-7; 30-1).

In that context, Irish-language film’s linguistic distinction from dominant global cinema might serve as a source of possibility rather than of limitation. As a minority-language cinema, Irish-language film has not tended to attract commercial funding and has generally been fully state funded. Contemporary Irish-language film has always been cognisant of international audiences, with films shown at international festivals, but given the language’s minority status its primary target audience has until recently been identified as national. In the wake of Quinn’s Irish-language films of the 1970s and 1980s, Irish-language film developed following the re-establishment of the Irish Film Board in 1993, with the establishment of TnaG (now TG4) in 1996 playing a crucial role in the emergence and development of film productions in Irish (Crosson 2024: 42). Various short film schemes launched under the auspices of TG4 between 1998 and 2010 saw the production of numerous Irish-language shorts, many of which enjoyed critical success and won national and international awards. As Irish-language film continued to develop, Crosson notes that

[t]here was ongoing frustration among directors regarding the limited budget and length allowed in the short film initiatives of TG4 and directors lobbied for a scheme to emerge that would facilitate feature film productions in Irish. The success of Tom Collins’ Kings (2007), a bilingual production set in London among Irish speaking emigrants from Conamara which received a theatrical release, and considerable critical acclaim […] suggested that there was potential for the further development of the Irish-language film sector. Eventually in 2017, TG4 announced the Cine4 scheme in conjunction with Bord Scannán Éireann/Irish Film Board and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland. Uniquely the scheme was only open “to live action feature film projects in the Irish language” but with “the potential to appeal to Irish and international audiences.” A budget “of up to €1.2 million” (TG4, 2017) was also permitted; while modest by international standards, it did allow some certainty to directors now shooting on cheaper digital formats. (Crosson 2024: 45)

The possibilities offered by the Cine4 scheme have been creatively utilised by a number of films produced under its auspices since 2019. I will focus on two feature films produced under the scheme, An Cailín Ciúin/The Quiet Girl (Colm Bairéad 2022) and Foscadh/Shelter (Seán Breathnach 2021), to illustrate how these Irish-language films serve as examples of minor cinema. David James defines minor cinema as one which stands outside of the hegemonic power centres and structures of the industry, that is connected to the political by virtue of its minority status and that is underpinned by collective enunciation, whereby the individual and the collective are mutually bounded (2005: 446-47). While Irish-language cinema is well positioned to serve as minor cinema by virtue of its production in a minoritised language in a postcolonial society, the language of the film does not of itself render it as minor cinema. My identification of these films as minor focuses on the way in which they draw on the Irish language and its discourses to develop modes distinct from the modes of dominant cinema and from many of the discursive values underlying it.

Both films explored here are adaptations of successful contemporary Irish novels written in English: An Cailín Ciúin is based on Foster (2010), written by Clare Keegan, while Foscadh is adapted from Donal Ryan’s novel The Thing About December (2013). The theme of vulnerability figures large in each of these films, a theme of both local and global importance in the context of globalisation. I will examine the way in which An Cailín Ciúin and Foscadh undertake a cinematic reimagining of indigenous discursive modes bound up with relationality, and in so doing offer a challenge to discourses of globalisation particularly as they relate to vulnerability. I will argue that the films’ utilisation of the concept of dúchas and of Irish-language discursive modes serves to render them as films that resonate at both local and global levels, a fact borne out by the unprecedented international critical and commercial success of An Cailín Ciúin (Foscadh may have been a victim of COVID restrictions affecting cinema attendance on its release in 2021, although it did garner several national and international accolades and awards).

Before turning to the films themselves, some exploration of the concepts of dúchas, globalisation and vulnerability is necessary. Ó Dónaill’s Irish-English dictionary translates dúchas as “hereditary right or claim; birthright; heritage; ancestral estate; patrimony” (1977: 458). As a term that encompasses multitudinous and shifting concepts and understandings, dúchas is not readily translated. In some contexts it can be translated as “native” (one’s native language or native place) and also as “indigenous” (indigenous aspects of culture, tradition, etc.). I draw here on the work of Peter McQuillan which employs a linguistic anthropological approach in exploring the concept of dúchas. McQuillan looks at the use and definition of the term in historical and contemporary contexts and discourses, detailing entries related to the term in the analogical Irish-language dictionary Gaoth an Fhocail (Ó Doibhlin 1988). Entries on dúchas relate to a broad array of fields, including relatives and descent, resemblance, knowledge and tradition, familial relationships, attitude, nature, culture, heritage, identity, native land and origin (2022: 22-23). McQuillan notes that “[a] number of conceptual domains are encompassed here, both on the individual and the collective level […]: dúchas as a sense of origin (where you come from); of relations (to whom and where you belong to); of heritage (what is natural or appropriate for you); of tradition (what it tells you about yourself); of identity (your country and culture) (original emphasis)” (2004: 23).

McQuillan proceeds to examine the relationship between the concepts of dúchas and dúthaigh/dúiche, where the latter term is commonly understood to relate to place, particularly one’s homeplace, and to land and homeland. McQuillan’s work highlights a close relationship between the terms, which were used interchangeably into the 17^th century. Looking at the semantic range of the term dúiche, he suggests that “dúthaigh (dúiche) and dúchas, even as a territorial assignation (homeland), are not so much a geographical-political concept as a symbolic one of context-dependent associations (landscape, culture, history and personal ties)” (2004: 90). Drawing on McQuillan’s insights, I employ the critical concept of “place” as one that echoes many of the concepts encompassed by dúchas within Irish-language discourse.

The concept of vulnerability as explored here follows Asier Altuna-García de Salazar in his exploration of the theme in the work of Donal Ryan. Altuna-García de Salazar asserts that:

Vulnerability is associated with a constellation of notions like “care” and “caring”, “responsibility”, “ethics”, “the Other”, but also with those of “trauma” and “the traumatised”. As a generic concept, vulnerability recognises a degree of exposure to marginalisation, fragmentation, visions of suffering, loss, victimisation, figures of the oppressed and hidden/inconvenient truths. (2023: 1253)

While vulnerability is not in itself a recent phenomenon, critical scholarship argues that vulnerability is a “paradigm of the contemporary condition and of contemporary culture” (Ganteau 2015 cited in Altuna-García de Salazar 2023: 1253) where contemporary culture is intricately bound up with globalisation. Globalisation “is a term which denotes increasing interactivity and exchange and the collapse of the barriers of distance and ideology which have previously served to frustrate the triumph of a universal capitalist order” (Athique 2013 cited in Barton 2019: 12), yet it is not solely an economic process but one that “results in the transformation of contemporary social life in all its economic, political, cultural, technological, ecological and individual dimensions” (Blommaert 2010: 3). Altuna-García de Salazar draws on the work of political scientist Peadar Kirby, who suggests a direct relationship between the contemporary prevalence of vulnerability and globalisation, where the latter is an effect of neoliberalism:

[M]y conviction has grown that vulnerability is an essential characteristic of globalisation and that without giving it central attention we fail to understand key aspects and events of the world around us. […] For, if the globalisation label means anything, it is an attempt to find some term that can express fundamental shifts in power, in social structures and even in cultural sensibilities that are impacting on all our lives. (Kirby 2005: viii)

If increased threats and reduced coping mechanisms are some of the signs and symptoms of vulnerability, Kirby follows the approach of economic anthropologist Karl Polyani as one

[that] identifies the relationship of the market to society as the central causal mechanism at work. In doing this, it underlines the significance that economic liberalisation plays in the growing vulnerability of the financial, economic, social, cultural, political, environmental and personal spheres through increased threats to human well-being and reduced mechanisms to cope with these. (2006: 648)

The theme of vulnerability as bound up with marginalisation has figured large in contemporary Irish-language cinema in its interrogation of the sociolinguistic marginalisation of the Irish-language and of its speech communities, while Irish cinema more generally has featured explorations of vulnerability and exclusion before, during and after the Celtic Tiger. In relation to “second-wave” Irish films, Barton observes that “If [Irish-language short films] have been notable for their refusal to relegate Irish-language culture to the cinematic margins, so other works in the 1990s have removed issues of social marginality from the preserve of the avant-garde and ‘poor cinema’ and attempted to relocate them within main-stream filmmaking practices” (2004: 182). In asking whether 21^st-century Irish cinema can be considered as arthouse cinema, she notes that

[o]ne definition of art cinema sees it as oppositional to the dominant culture, as was British art cinema of the 1980s, and certainly many of the films discussed in this book are critical of Ireland’s embrace of materialism under the Celtic Tiger. Yet, it is less that they are political films in the way that the much lauded “first wave” of works by Joe Comerford, Pat Murphy, Bob Quinn and their peers in the 1970s and 1980s are understood to be but that they aim to engage audience empathy with alienated, struggling individuals who have found themselves on the wrong side of Ireland’s new economy. (2019: 34)

Representations of vulnerable individuals and groups have also come to feature in cinema more broadly in recent years on foot of calls for greater visibility of identities and voices which have been either invisible from or have been negatively portrayed within dominant cinema. While the cinematic exploration of vulnerability is not therefore unique, both An Cailín Ciúin and Foscadh, in their foregrounding and interrogation of vulnerability, draw on relational modes that stem from the “symbolic universe” of the Irish language and culture (Ó Crualaoich 1988: 14), a mode bound up with the concept of dúchas. Within the relational mode, the person is imagined and understood in relation to a multiplicity of other beings, both human and non-human, existing in the past and the present. Such understandings stand in contrast to the individualistic conception of the person which emerged with the advent of modernity and has become ever more dominant and pervasive under the discourse of neoliberalism. Referring to the cultural concept of the person that underlies psychotherapy, Kirmayer describes the model of the person within dominant western discourses and contrasts it with alternative relational models:

The cultural concept of the person that underwrites most forms of psychotherapy is based on Euro-American values of individualism. This individualistic and egocentric concept of the person can be contrasted with more sociocentric, ecocentric or cosmocentric views, which understand the person in relation to the social world, the environment, and the cosmos. (2007: 232)

The concept of dúchas encompasses sociocentric, ecocentric and cosmocentric conceptions of the person which are evident within the practices and dynamics of Irish-language oral culture. In the performative context of oral culture, texts and the meanings ascribed to them foster dynamic personal and interpersonal relationships, not only between the individual and the community, but between the person and material and cultural landscapes, between landscapes of memory and of the present and between the landscapes of the mundane or profane world and those of the sacred or otherworld. Another feature of the relational mode of oral culture is that it functions both intersubjectively and metaphorically, enabling the indirect expression of personal or collective experience through recourse to a tale, song or other cultural text seen to reflect or correspond to the experience.

The operation of such dynamics is illustrated in Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s account of his wedding in his classic autobiography An tOileánach/The Islandman (2002 [1929]), in which he details his singing of the traditional song “Caisleán Uí Néill” (“O’Neill’s Castle”) during the celebrations. Within Ó Criomhthain’s autobiography, he tells of his romantic interest in a girl from the Ó Dálaigh family, but recounts that his sister persuaded Tomás’s parents to arrange a marriage between him and another woman. Lillis Ó Laoire gives an incisive reading of the significance of Ó Criomhthain’s song performance:

The song that Tomás claims to have sung […] “Caisleán Uí Néill”, is a classic example of a Chanson de la Jeune Fille, where the girl laments her desertion by a lover whom she believed had been true to her. In the scenario painted by Ó Croimhthain, the singer is a man, at his own wedding, singing primarily from the girl’s persona, about an intense romantic relationship that has ended because of his betrothal to another. […] [I]t can also be read, not only as a lament for his first love, the girl from Inis Mhic Fhaoláin, but also as an oblique protest against, and a resigned submission to the system of matchmaking that then prevailed, and, moreover, against the extreme harshness of economic and physical conditions. (2009: 193-94)

The intersubjective and metaphorical modes of Irish-language discourse serve a number of functions in Ó Criomthain’s performance. One function is clearly protective, facilitating the indirect expression of sensitive personal experiences. The question of protection is important in the context of vulnerability: direct expression of an experience may exacerbate one’s vulnerability in bringing up emotional pain and suffering while also carrying the risk of exposure to judgement or to other negative social consequences. Thanks to their intersubjective perspective, such modes serve not only as a means of protection but also serve to establish and reinforce relationality. As Ó Laoire’s analysis illustrates, oral cultural practices foster a doubled positioning; the performer adopts and occupies the position both of narrator and of the persona of the song, as do the listeners. The sean-nós[1] singer Seosamh Ó hÉanaí/Joe Heaney explained this intersubjective aspect of oral Irish-language culture in an interview with American folklorist Kenneth Goldstein, some of which features in the film Song of Granite:

GOLDSTEIN: Now, when there are several characters, in either a song or a story, how do you decide which character you become?

Ó hÉANAÍ: I put myself in the place of the man who’s telling the main part of that story. We’ll say I’m telling a story about Fionn Mac Cumhaill. Now I’m looking at Fionn Mac Cumhaill, I put myself as a person who’s watching this thing happening. But he is the main character there, Fionn Mac Cumhaill, but I’m watching him, I’m following him all around the path he’s taking.

GOLDSTEIN: In other words, you’re both following him, you’re watching him but you’re also playing him. You are him at the same time then (original emphasis).

Ó hÉANAÍ: Yeah. I’m putting myself in his shoes although I’m only following him.

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, what you mean is, you get the feelings as if you were him (original emphasis).

Ó hÉANAÍ: Yeah, well that’s what I mean. (Collins 2017)

The intersubjective mode aligns with a relational model of the person: experiences of performer and audience are imagined and expressed as echoes of the experiences of the persona/character of the text, affirming such experiences as ones held in common, as opposed to something unique and individual. Both An Cailín Ciúin and Foscadh succeed in utilising the intersubjective mode of oral Irish-language culture within the cinematic form, highlighting its value as a means of addressing vulnerability.

Vulnerability pervades the film An Cailín Ciúin. The film foregrounds the vulnerability of the main character, Cáit, as a child and a girl growing up in Ireland in the early 1980s but includes a focus on various forms of vulnerability. Cáit’s family is dysfunctional: her father, Dan, is a heavy drinker and compulsive gambler and her mother, Máire, is clearly suffering various pressures, and her relationship with Dan is pervaded by tension. Cáit is sent to stay with her mother’s cousin, Eibhlín Kinsella and Eibhlín’s husband Seán for the summer to ease some of the pressure on Máire, who is expecting her sixth child. An Cailín Ciúin focuses on the relationship that develops between Cáit and her carers and particularly between her and Seán. The theme of vulnerability is indexed in linguistic terms: Cáit, her mother and siblings and Eibhlín and Seán demonstrate various vulnerabilities, reflected by the status and position of their mother tongue, which is Irish. The vulnerability of those characters is contrasted with the character of Dan, whose language, English, is the societal and cultural language of power.

The theme of vulnerability is intertwined with silence and secrecy and with questions relating to exposure and protection. Those themes reflect the dominant mores of Church and State in Ireland during the period, mores that shrouded questions around domestic and family difficulties in silence. That silence impacted particularly heavily on women and children, who had little or no recourse to official support in situations involving domestic violence. In the cultural climate of 1980s Ireland where law, fear and shame served as mechanisms of control, issues of domestic, gender and sexual violence met with silence, not only within official discourse but often also at the level of the individual and the community. However, An Cailín Ciúin illustrates the operation of various kinds of silence and secrecy, some of which are bound up with care, dignity and relationality.

Cáit’s silence is a vulnerable, wary silence; it is evident that experience has taught her that speech and interaction are potentially dangerous and threatening. Cáit watches and listens keenly to her parents’ words and actions in an attempt to make sense of her family situation, though it is clear to the viewer that she does not fully understand what is happening. The film employs a narrative mode that echoes the intersubjective mode of oral storytelling in its use of a doubled perspective: the audience is placed in the position of witness (corresponding to that of the storyteller and listener) and granted the perspective of Cáit (corresponding to the persona of the story) at various points within the film. The audience does not have total insight into what is occurring within the family, though it is evident that Cáit and her sisters have some fear of their father. Conversely, while Cáit does not fully comprehend her mother’s silence, we as audience understand that Máire is struggling with multiple difficulties and that her silence is an attempt to conceal her vulnerability from her children. The doubled positioning employed as a narrative mode within the film is echoed and reinforced visually. Several shots are framed by doorways and other thresholds whereby the audience witnesses the action at a distance, but at certain points the camera mirrors Cáit’s wary, cautious point of view, which notices details whose meanings not fully transparent to the character. In a powerful scene which employs the intersubjective positioning developed in An Cailín Ciúin, Dan gives a lift to a woman while Cáit sits in the back of the car. Dan turns up the radio when the woman enters the car and the audience hears snatches of the conversation between the adults as heard by Cáit. The camera shots correspond to Cáit’s viewpoint; she studies the heads of the adults in front and focuses on the long, red earring worn by the woman, visible to Cáit as the woman turns her head towards Dan. The shot underlines Cáit’s fascination with the glamourous piece of jewellery, but the scene hints at a sexual relationship between Dan and the woman, a point reinforced visually and metaphorically by the close-up shot of the phallic red earring, although Cáit, as a child and as the persona of the tale, is not privy to this knowledge.

When Cáit arrives at Eibhlín and Seán’s home, their house is presented as a silent place holding a degree of secrecy. The couple makes no explicit reference to their dead son, though the film gives visual hints that the couple have a child who is no longer present. Cáit sleeps in the boy’s bedroom, indicated by the wallpaper patterned with cars and trains, and Eibhlín dresses Cáit in her late son’s clothes, though this fact is not explained to her. The audience gleans that the couple’s silence arises out of grief and suffering, but without an understanding of the situation, Cáit is wary of Seán, interpreting his silence as dangerous, an echo of the silence of her father. As time passes, however, Cáit develops a deeper understanding, and she and Seán develop a quiet but intimate relationship built on acts and actions rather than on words. Cáit helps Seán with work on the farm and a ritual develops where Cáit runs to the letterbox to collect the post while Seán times her. The relationship between the two illustrates silence as concerned with care and protection in the context of vulnerability. Vulnerability includes a sensitivity to hurt or injury, and as illustrated by the metaphorical function of oral texts, direct speech and expression can cause or compound such hurts. The injurious and harmful potential of direct speech and expression is borne out by Úna, a neighbour of the Kinsellas, who brings Cáit home from the wake of another neighbour. Úna’s speech and words serve as a violent attack on the vulnerability of Cáit and her carers, as she pumps Cáit for information to satisfy her venal inquisitiveness and reveals her love of gossip in her malicious revelation of secrets. It is Úna who reveals the story of the Kinsellas’ son to Cáit, which she does in a harsh and unfeeling manner:

ÚNA: Well, after wearing the clothes of the dead for the past month … you didn’t know?

CÁIT: What about?

ÚNA: The Kinsellas’ boy, idiot. The cabbage they found you under must have been a big one! (my translation). (Bairéad 2022)

This incident leaves Cáit and the couple disturbed and shaken. Eibhlín is both guilt-ridden and horrified at Úna’s treatment of Cáit, while we suspect that Cáit is upset both by what she has learned and by the fact that the story has been hidden from her. Seán and Cáit leave the house to give Eibhlín some space in the wake of the upset. They sit on the beach in silence, looking out to sea where two lights can be seen on the horizon. After explaining to Cáit that the wood on which they are sitting comes from an old stable door, Seán tells her a story:

SEÁN: Did you know that fishermen sometimes catch horses at sea? I know a man who reeled in a colt once. And the horse lay on the strand for a long, long time, as if he was nearing his end. Until he stood up suddenly, right as rain again.

CÁIT: He was alright?

SEÁN: Back to his old self. Perfect (my translation). (Bairéad 2022)

The scene marks an important point in the film, in which the relationship between Cáit and Seán is strengthened and deepened. Seán employs a story in the traditional mode to give an indirect, metaphorical interpretation of the evening’s events, with a message that Cáit will heal from the harm caused by Úna’s attack. The story is underlain by the concept of dúchas, or place: it is a sociocentric, cosmocentric and ecocentric tale peopled by human and non-human personae and linked to the place in which it is told. Having told the tale, Seán affirms the value and wisdom of silence, and of Cáit’s silence, as a protective mechanism:

SEÁN: You don’t need to say anything. Always remember that. Many’s the person who didn’t take the opportunity to keep their mouth shut. And who lost a lot as a result (my translation). (Bairéad 2022)

Cáit turns to look back at the sea as they return home: the camera mimics Cáit’s perspective and focuses on a third light now visible on the horizon, where there had been two. Through Cáit’s eyes, place itself affirms the truth both of Seán’s story and its message of support and hope in the face of difficult experiences.

An Cailín Ciúin is set in 1981, a period when Irish society differed markedly from contemporary Ireland in many respects. As Roddy Flynn states:

An Cailín Ciúin quietly exposes the nature of pre-Celtic Tiger Irish society in a manner that, for those who lived through that period, was hard to name, precisely because it constituted, to paraphrase Raymond Williams, the “cultural air” of the moment. The assumptions and presumptions of Irish society in the 1970s and 1980s […] were so omnipresent as to be invisible. And thus the brutality of Irish society hid in plain sight. This is not to argue that the Celtic Tiger and its associated and subsequent social and cultural changes should be unproblematically embraced wholesale. If anything An Cailín Ciúin indirectly encourages us to consider our own moment and to scrutinize the unexamined (because taken for granted) values that inform the disposition of our society. (2022: 369)

The official silence surrounding issues relating to family dysfunction and breakdown, sexuality and gender violence was a central facet of the societal brutality of the period, a point that serves as context for the tale of An Cailín Ciúin. However, the film demonstrates that not all silences are toxic or dysfunctional and that kindness, intimacy and relationality can be expressed through silence and indirection. Eibhlín and Seán’s quiet relationality is a means of protection against the overexposure of one’s vulnerability; direct expression of personal experiences carries the risk of framing such experiences as unique and individual, increasing one’s suffering through isolation. Through the indigenous modes of Irish-language discourse, suffering and vulnerability may be understood and overcome as conditions that, notwithstanding the specificity of the experience, are collective and shared.

Foscadh engages in many respects in such scrutinisation of the values underlying contemporary Irish society, yet the film aligns with An Cailín Ciúin in focusing and drawing on indigenous discourse as a mode of relationality. Foscadh focuses on John Cunliffe, a man from a Gaeltacht village in Connemara. The Irish language is a marker of this community’s marginal economic status but does not serve as an index of community relationality or solidarity, with various members of the community exhibiting greed and self-interest. In chronological terms John is an adult, yet in many respects he displays the vulnerability of a child, exhibiting characteristics that hint at neurodivergence, though this is never explicitly addressed in the film. John’s affinity with and comfort in nature contrasts with the difficulty and lack of understanding he experiences in other spheres. He is ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of contemporary life, especially in his relationships with other people. The film opens at the point where John’s mother has died; we learn that John’s parents pampered and cossetted him in a bid to protect him, but it is clear that John was heavily dependent on their protection and that he is acutely vulnerable in their absence. As an only child, John has inherited the farm and the land and his relative prosperity makes him the subject of others’ envy, resentment and greed. Eugene, a man from John’s village, brutally attacks him, motivated by jealousy and by the knowledge that John, as a vulnerable person, is an easy target.

The violence that John encounters is not solely physical. Speech and verbal skill are also deployed against him. The verbal dexterity of some of Foscadh’s characters functions as an indirect form of aggression or manipulation used to exploit John’s vulnerability. Like Cáit in An Cailín Ciúin, John is a quiet character, aware that speech interactions can leave him more vulnerable. While in hospital after the attack, John encounters fellow patient Dave and the nurse Siobhán. Dave and John become friends and a relationship develops between John and Siobhán, although we as audience suspect that both Dave and Siobhán are motivated at least as much by their interest in John’s wealth as by affinity or affection. Like An Cailín Ciúin, Foscadh draws on the intersubjective method of oral storytelling. At certain points in the film the audience is placed in the position of witness and at others shares John’s perspective, while at times being placed in both positions simultaneously. This dual positionality operates both narratalogically and visually, with shots sometimes framed through doors or windows and at other times mirroring John’s perspective. In narrative terms, a degree of doubt persists regarding Dave and Siobhán’s motives, but the audience is given no definitive insights into their behaviour, mirroring John’s confusion and difficulty making sense of these relationships. Unlike John, however, the audience is fully aware of the manipulative and dishonest behaviour of businessman Stephen, who seeks to get hold of John’s land to develop it as a profitable wind farm.

Stephen uses the medium of speech in his attempts to trick John into selling his land for a paltry sum. The scene where Stephen tries to pressure John into the sale offers two contrasting views of land. Stephen sees the land in terms of economic value and profit, while John imagines it in terms of dúiche, as a place in relationship with himself, with his family and ancestors, and with his heritage or dúchas as a whole. Stephen’s words and speech serve as a form of violence against John, whose body language signals that he feels himself subject to an attack against which he has no defence. In the next scene, we see John on the land; the camera focuses both on him and on the landscape as he attempts to list the placenames and names of the fields around him as if reciting a prayer or incantation:

JOHN: Binn Gheal, Binn Bhuí, Carraig Thoir – Carraig Láir – Carraig Thiar, Mám Chloch an Leamhain, Baile an Tobair, Dúloch, Baile Dhúloch … Carraig Thiar, Baile Dhúloch, Baile an Tobair, talamh Fintan [Fintan’s land], talamh s’againne [our land] … Dúloch … Cloch an Mháma … Binn Gheal, Binn Bhuí … Binn … Binn Gheal, Binn Bhuí, Carraig Thoir – Carraig Láir – Carraig Thiar, Baile Dhúloch, baile s’againne [our home]… talamh Fintan, talamh s’againne. (Breathnach 2021)[2]

The prayer or incantation is a ritual utterance requiring that its words be spoken from beginning to end in the correct order to claim the power of the statement. It is clear that the litany of placenames attempted by John functions as a ritualistic utterance, a means of connection with place as John seeks refuge, comfort and protection following his encounter with Stephen. John attempts the incantation again and again but cannot recite it coherently, upset and confused in the face of Stephen’s assertion that his land is of no value, nothing but “bog and stones” (my translation) (Breathnach 2021).

The centrality of place and the relational aspects of dúchas are also seen in the relationship between John and his uncle Paddy, the only person with whom John has a secure relationship following his parents’ death. Paddy tries to advise John and to encourage and motivate him to stand on his own two feet and make his way in life. When they go to the holy well to seek healing for John’s injuries following the attack, Paddy tells a story about a greedy man who came to the well seeking healing but who failed to give thanks for the cure he received and was punished as a result. As Paddy walks clockwise around the well uttering prayers in the manner of traditional popular ritual, John talks about his father, who came to the well seeking a cure when he was sick with cancer. Paddy affirms that his father was a “giant of a man” (my translation) and that John has the same qualities as his father (Breathnach 2021). The story told by Paddy and the scene as a whole encompass some of the sociocentric, ecocentric, and cosmocentric dimensions of dúchas through which lessons are taught and guidance given regarding reciprocal, mutually sustaining relationships between place and the individual, the community, the material and the spiritual.

John mulls over Stephen’s offer. Partially convinced by Stephen’s assertion that his land is of no value, John considers selling it to Stephen and leaving the area. His relationships with Dave and Siobhán continue to develop, but it is clear to the audience that the two are in competition as they try to gain exclusive sway over John. Siobhán eventually manages to drive Dave away, and John, buoyed up by alcohol, initiates sex with her. In the disturbing scene that follows, the vulnerability we witness is Siobhán’s: she becomes increasingly distressed as she suffers John’s clumsy and rough attempts at sex, but he either fails to recognise her anguish or does not understand whether or how to respond to it. Siobhán ends the encounter and the relationship between them, leaving after telling John “I tried” (my translation) (Breathnach 2021).

Alone once again, John turns to place and to all that he associates with it and derives from it. He makes his way to the area of the farm where Stephen has already begun construction, despite John not having yet signed the contract. The scene marks a crucial point in terms of John’s coming of age. It echoes the earlier scene where he unsuccessfully attempted to call up the names of the places around him, but on this occasion his voice recites the litany clearly and confidently. John’s performative recital resonates with the practice of “speaking with names” among the Western Apache in the United States as studied and described by anthropologist Keith Basso. The Apache employ placenames to communicate cultural, social and moral wisdom and guidance in a practice that fosters and reinforces sociocentric, ecocentric and cosmocentric relations. Basso observes that:

the constructions Apaches impose upon their landscape have been fashioned from the same cultural materials as constructions they impose upon themselves as members of society. Both give expression to the same set of values, standards and ideals; both are manifestations of the same distinctive charter for being-in-the-world. Inhabitants of their landscape, the Western Apache are thus inhabited by it as well (original emphasis). (1996: 102)

Basso’s analysis and description of the relationship between the Apache and the landscape they inhabit, mediated and fostered through indigenous placenames, accords closely with the understandings and relationships found within Irish-language discourse and culture, and Foscadh offers a powerful cinematic representation of the latter in the scenes where John struggles and ultimately succeeds in the practice of “labhairt le logainmneacha”/“speaking with placenames” as an affirmation of his relationship with dúiche and dúchas and accordingly of his place in the world. John’s coming of age is illustrated visually as he sits in the bulldozer left on the site by Stephen. John shifts the gears of the engine, ready to take control of his life (he has not been able to drive up to this point or has lacked the confidence to attempt it). When Paddy dies, John is left completely alone, but with the guidance Paddy has given him and with the support of dúiche and dúchas to draw on, John proceeds to confront his attacker Eugene and tears up Stephen’s contract. The film closes with John seated in the jeep left by his parents: he starts the engine, ready to make his way in the contemporary world.

An Cailín Ciúin and Foscadh proclaim their minor status both in relation to the dominant film industry and in relation to dominant discourses of globalisation. As Irish-language films that draw on intersubjective metaphorical modes of storytelling and communication that issue from Irish-language discourse, the films foster resonances between their own stories and universal experiences of vulnerability, utilising and developing that intersubjective mode of storytelling at both narrative and visual levels in formally innovative ways. Moreover, the films offer what might be termed minor explorations of vulnerability. Under neoliberal understandings of globalisation, vulnerability is viewed as a weakness issuing from the individual subject, and equally as something to be overcome on an individual basis:

[N]eoliberal discourse starts with the irreducible choice-making individual and then works up to reconstruct the world as one made of poor choices and understandings. The world is produced through our own knowledge and information capacities and vulnerabilities (or incapacities) and therefore one that we bear responsibility for. […] [T]he world is pluralized in ways which increasingly tend to blame “vulnerable” [individuals and] communities for their own shortcomings in how information and knowledge is accessed and used. (Chandler and Reid 2016: 121-23)

Foscadh and An Cailín Ciúin not only give insights into the diverse and multidimensional nature and basis of vulnerability but draw on the concepts of dúiche and dúchas to highlight the role of relationality in mitigating some of the major challenges and divisions issuing from vulnerability. In their positioning as minority-language films that explore issues of marginalisation and exclusion, working within modes that underline the centrality of relationships between the individual and the collective, the films offer minor visions that, judging by the success of An Cailín Ciúin, are striking a deep chord with both national and international audiences.[3] If we accept that vulnerability is indeed the central condition of contemporary culture under globalisation, and if neoliberal constructions of vulnerability ring hollow for many of us, the universal resonances of An Cailín Ciúin and Foscadh’s minor chords begin to make sense, demonstrating the central place of contemporary Irish-language film within Irish cinema as it claims its place in the local and the global imagination.

Notes

[1] sean-nós (old-style) is a traditional Irish-language form of song and singing.

[2] I have not translated these placenames as their anglicised versions do not and cannot illustrate the relationship between Irish-language placenames, dúiche and dúchas. Anglicised forms of Irish placenames are emptied of the meanings, connotations and cultural and discursive significance that abide within the original Irish-language forms, a point that is underscored by this and other scenes within the film.

[3] An analysis of Kneecap [Rich Peppiatt, 2024] is beyond the scope of this article, but its huge commercial and critical success suggests that the international success of An Cailín Ciúin as an Irish-language film is not a once-off).