Biography
Ferdia is a recent graduate of the Film and TV Production BA from IADT. While there, he focused on story and character, specialising in screenwriting with editing as a supporting craft. Short films he wrote in college have been screened in film festivals across Ireland and internationally, including NFFTY Youth Film Festival in Seattle. Upon graduating, he won the Aileen McKeogh Award for contributing “most in practice and principal to the vision of Arts”.
While writing, he works for RTÉ's Fair City as a Story Assistant. He’s also published several columns in the Irish Times about the disability community. He was given a platform to write about the challenges and discriminations disabled people face and the philosophical and sociological reality of life in disabled bodies.
Writing like this, intimately and publicly about his own life, prepared him for work on this personal and ambitious screenplay. A commenter named Steve once accused him of going “against everything the enlightenment, free speech and the scientific method stand for”. He is unreasonably proud of this - it makes him sound a lot cooler than he is.
He also worked as an editing mentor for the National Youth Film School and facilitates advocacy workshops for disabled people in care communities.
Ferdia feels a little awkward with third-person bios, but he truly does believe in stories - in their beauty and in their power.
"When I was a teenager, in the shadow of a life-threatening surgery, my friends and I made the same judgement call that Laura and Michael make in my film. We fled my life and we fled its unlivable circumstances."
Project Title: Briefly Gorgeous
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Genre: Coming-of-Age Drama
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Target Audience: This is the type of film that will begin with a younger festival/art-house audience and expand through word of mouth.
"This isn’t really a true story; too many elements in the script come from my imagination (or from the demands of three-act structure) for it to be that. But I know what it’s like to drink and to laugh and to make music on the sharp end of mortality."
Synopsis
It starts with an empty chair. Laura and Noah file into an exam centre. And Michael isn’t there. Before they ask themselves why, their exam papers are in front of them. A bell goes off and they begin the last few hours of their school lives.
After, they imagine all of the horrible reasons he’s missing. The truth is worse than all of them. He has a tumour growing and pressing and pulsing against his brain. There’s nothing that anyone can do.
But they can’t do nothing.
So Laura says they’ve got to get out of their grey wasteland of a suburb. She says they’ve got to go somewhere beautiful together, the three of them. Michael looks at her and smiles his gorgeous smile. His first smile since that day in the hospital. So in the dark, Laura takes her dad’s car and they drive into the morning. To their cottage by the water.
Michael’s body starts to destroy him so much faster than they thought it would. There, in the salt and death flecked air, he finds some certainty. He doesn’t want to die in the hospital.
He can’t die in the hospital.
The teenagers fight and laugh and get high and sleep together. When it gets bad, when Michael can’t speak or recognise faces, Noah begs to call somebody. But Laura stands in his way, stubborn and strong.
This is a sad story, there’s no avoiding that, with some truly ugly moments. But there are brief moments of connection, moments of music and laughter and intimacy and love that - hopefully - make it a gorgeous story too.
"I tried very hard to make this an honest script. I tried to be honest about what young people’s lives are like. I tried to be honest about just how ugly a major illness can get. I tried to be honest about the scars that the world will leave on you, and I tried to be honest about how much they heal."