Kevin Henry, writer and director of the acclaimed low-budget feature Soulsmith, writes for Culture ahead of the film's Irish TV premiere, on Friday, December 21st on RTÉ One.
After beginning sensible degrees like science and medicine, I could never settle in them and ultimately packed them in. I was drawn in all the time by this damned desire to try my hand at filmmaking. Oddly enough, when I finished my media degree Hollywood forgot to call - so, naturally, I ended up working in a DIY shop with a classmate named Seamus Waters – who would come on board as Soulsmith's producer. It was while wandering the aisles of this shop masterfully dodging managers and customers alike we hatched a plan to go and make a feature film. I started writing the script that became Soulsmith while working there.
When I thought the script was near completed, we said to hell with it and packed in the day jobs. At the time we thought it'd be shot and cut in the space of a year – this was over 4 years ago! Blissful ignorance precluded us from predicting all the pitfalls that lay in store for us, but every setback became just another point in a steep but priceless learning curve.
Rejection letters came thick and fast as we applied for as many schemes as possible, but no funding streams were forthcoming. This is an interesting time - do you take the rejection personal? Are we wasting our time? Driven by an inner fire (or just pure thickness) and a certainty in what I wanted to achieve we proceeded regardless. The script was written so that it could be made for a very low budget. We ploughed on, receiving great support from friends and family, and an incredible cast and crew whose dedication went way beyond anything we could have expected.
When writing Soulsmith, so much coverage on my generation had been about emigration but I just wanted to focus on those who stayed. And in a more focused sense, Soulsmith tries to take a step back and look at masculinity within my generation. Gender and its meaning is very much in the contemporary discussion, and rightly so, but what it is to be a man is evolving as much as any other meaning, and not discussed nearly enough in my opinion. Themes along these lines are discussed in Soulsmith in a quietly dramatic manner, but never too far from gentle humour or a sly dig.
Soulsmith has played many festivals both home and abroad. It won the best international feature at the Austin Revolution Film Festival, something that was an honour for us as a filmmaking team. What has been very interesting about this is that elements I thought were very Irish, particularly the humour and banter, have gone down very well when playing abroad. Overall, it's been a rollercoaster 'DIY' journey, but thankfully we have a film we are very proud to show to the world. And if you'd have told us when we were wandering the aisles dodging customers in that DIY store that we'd have gotten our film on RTE 1 during Christmas week, we'd certainly have taken it.... but you'd never have found us.
Soulsmith will have its television premiere on Friday, December 21st on RTÉ One at 11:55 pm.
