A film was shot on location in Co. Clare and featuring Academy Award winning actress Brenda Fricker, will be released in select Irish cinemas from September 19th.
The official trailer has been released for The Swallow, a feature film by Tadhg O’Sullivan.
The release of the film coincides with the publication of Brenda Fricker’s memoir, ‘She Died Young: A Life In Fragments’, from Head of Zeus.
An artist, isolated from the world but not from her memories, unpacks the remnants of a life long-lived and tries to make sense of her own unwillingness to let go.
In a small house by the sea, a woman begins a letter to an unknown correspondent. Surrounded by the books, mementoes and clutter of her life, her home exposed to the waves of a rising ocean, she writes about the history of lost art. Considering what has been lost, and wondering about her own desire to hold on, she meditates on memory and on art’s aspiration to immortality.
Speaking of the genesis of the film, O’Sullivan commented, “The Swallow emerged from a series of questions that had preoccupied me for some time. Questions about the preservation of art, about the politics of what art is preserved. To make the questions acutely relevant, I imagined an older person, an artist living by a sea whose rising tidemark was a daily reminder of the world’s fate beyond her. Working with Brenda took the film to a different level. Here was someone who could bring a deeply personal understanding of solitude in later life. This insight was key to our development of the character. We wanted to create a unique portrait of a unique character, of a kind rarely represented on screen.”
Brenda Fricker added “Working on The Swallow was a unique and wonderful experience. Director and writer Tadhg O’Sullivan allowed me an unusual freedom to interpret the world that he had created. My challenge was to bring life to this woman, and her place within the landscape and a loneliness that refused pity.”
The Swallow was funded by The Arts Council/An Comhairle Ealaíonn under the Authored Works scheme.
Brenda was born and lives in Dublin and is a multi-award-winning actress whose career spans six decades. She won the Academy Award in 1989 for Best Supporting Actress for her role in My Left Foot. Other film roles include The Field with Richard Harris & John Hurt; Home Alone 2: Lost in New York; Angels in the Outfield; A Time to Kill, Veronica Guerin, A Long Way From Home, Inside I’m Dancing, Cloudburst with Olympia Dukakis, and Albert Nobbs with Glenn Close.
Tadhg O’Sullivan is a film-maker, radio maker, sound artist and writer based in the west o fIreland. His films include the features To the Moon (2020), The Great Wall (2015), Yximalloo (2004) and The Swallow (2024), as well as numerous shorts, television pieces and gallery works.
These have screened at festivals internationally including Telluride, Venice, CPH:DOX, MoMA Doc Fortnight and many others. For radio he has written and produced work for the BBC and for RTÉ, where he has an ongoing essay series–’The Cloud of Unknowing’. For many years he worked as a freelance editor and sound designer, with credits that included the Pat Collins features Silence (2012) and Song of Granite (2016).