Over two years, artists Catherine O’Halloran and Grace Dyas created The No Show, a 'trauma-informed contemporary art film' inspired by working-class men who don't 'turn up'.
Working with young men in community organisation Limerick City Build, the duo devised a work exploring the experiences of working-class families, going back six generations.
Ahead of a screening at this year's First Fortnight festival, Catherine O'Halloran introduces The No Show.
There are so many unfilled seats and unanswered calls, appointments missed, and absentees in our world, but rarely do we pause to ask where they are.
This film presents visceral flickers of hunger, loss, abuse, banality and reality that celebrate our absences, emptiness, and blank spaces, to bring us right into the present and allow us a window to show up for ourselves.
I remember being in school and absence for me meant peace, for my mother it meant safety, for my father the stakes were even higher again. And in cases you were made to go, we can even be no shows as we stand right in front of you, having dissociated a long time ago.
This film, The NO Show pulled a thread that was infused with absence but revealed a chasm of intergenerational loss that has laid the foundation for the experiences and apparent resistance or apathy, of just not being able to make it.
We found so much profound thematic revelation we in making this film, combining Artist Grace Dyas’s unique skills and experience of filmmaking and theatre with Catherine O’Halloran’s visual artistry and trauma-informed therapeutic practice. It seemed the highest form of collaboration was possible, every ingredient available, every skill was unified, and we found magic in moments where we stumbled over the same precious gems, that make filmmaking so enjoyably process driven.
Together we evoked a unique space where men could share, we could listen and sometimes fill in the gaps where they wouldn’t show up to the room.
Trauma is an interesting thing to work with, I imagine it as having a unique lifeform of its own, shifting energetically around the room, actively trying to keep us safe, and oppressed, but inadvertently slowly killing us.
You see we must bear witness to each other’s pain, no matter how bad. No matter how unimaginable. It must find release. The truth is the only safe place. So often we see young men running from themselves in the hope of escaping it. But it’s our fate, the unavoidable truth of our lifetimes. Yours too, and in this film our aim was to tell a truth in a way never told before.
It is challenging to watch, illuminating at times, full of irony and humour only possible in this context in Limerick. It speaks to a story rooted in Limerick's past and travels into the present, but is a universal tale.
Our hope is that speaking truth without shame can free something we all share in the collective. That we don't look away or pretend this isn’t happening anymore. We can hold onto the realities of the ‘NO Shows’ and cultivate a new level of understanding and compassion.
In that sense, The No Show is a film about all of us.
The No Show will screen on Monday, January 13th 2025 at the Vue, Limerick at 6.30pm and at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin later in the spring - find out more here, and dive deeper into the First Fortnight programme here.
