International Women’s Day 2024: Spotlight on new projects from Irish female creative talent
Posted: 8th March 2024
Today marks International Women's Day (March 8th), a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women's equality.
The campaign theme for 2024 is Inspire Inclusion - underscoring the crucial role of inclusion in achieving gender equality, and encouraging everyone to recognise the unique perspectives and contributions of women from all walks of life, including those from marginalised communities. Promoting the creative and artistic talent of women and girls, and the key role women have played in shaping Ireland’s collective cultural and creative identity, is one of the many ways to understand, value and seek out the inclusion of women in society.
As part of our artistic leadership role in film and screen content, it is vitally important that Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland supports projects representing a contemporary Ireland with all of its uniqueness, originality of voice and cultural diversity. Across the total of 39 Screen Ireland-supported productions in 2023, 41% of these projects had a female director attached, while 46% had a female screenwriter attached. The agency continues to commit to gender parity through a number of initiatives specifically targeted to incentivise an increased number of applications from Irish female talent and improve the representation of female filmmakers across the screen industry, including the Co-Development Fund for Female and Non-Binary Filmmakers and X-POLLINATOR 2024. Additionally, enhanced production funding remains available for female Irish creative talent seeking to produce live-action, animated and documentary feature films. More information is available on Screen Ireland's Funding page.
The agency's 2024 Production Slate, launched this January, highlighted several upcoming projects helmed by female creative talent across film, television, documentary, animation and short films. This includes several feature directorial debuts, including Claire Frances Byrne's coming-of-age story with a twist Ready or Not and Eva Birthistle's Kathleen is Here, expanding from the director's award-winning 2018 film; as well as new features from established filmmakers, such as Anne McCabe's Irish language Blue Fiddle/Fidil Ghorm and Aislinn Clarke's horror Fréwaka.
Meanwhile, projects such as Nuala O'Connor's In Time: Dónal Lunny, accounting for the life and work of the artist and his unique impact on Irish traditional music throughout the decades, Myrid Carten's No Place Like Home, an experimental story framed around a contested family house in Donegal, and Aoife Kelleher's Mrs Robinson which follows Mary Robinson as she approaches the age of 80 and takes on the biggest battle of life, promise a wide range of new stories from Irish female documentary filmmakers.
Several series helmed by women showrunners will be broadcast throughout the year, including Tailored Films' Louise Lives Large, the Hannah Quinn-directed The Boy That Never Was and the return of Nancy Harris' The Dry. For younger audiences, Anna Rodgers' interactive hybrid animation/documentary series Where the Wild Geese Go and Studio Meala's Doodle Girl, co-directed by Cora McKenna, are animation highlights to look forward to. The complete 2024 Screen Ireland Production Slate can be found here.
Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland continues to support emerging talent aspiring to write, direct and produce, for the cinema and beyond through several schemes. 13 out of the 14 films funded under the latest rounds of the agency's cornerstone Focus Shorts and Frameworks short film schemes have a female director, writer, or producer. These films are at different stages of productions and will make their festival debuts later this year. Other key emerging talent schemes, such as Actor as Creator in partnership with Bow Street Academy, and Spotlight Stage to Screen have given funding to exciting new female talent to realise their projects this year.