Donegal visual artist and filmmaker Myrid Carten has said that making her debut feature, the searing, highly original A Want In Her, has "changed" her.
The acclaimed documentary, which won the Audience Award at the Dublin International Film Festival in March and has now been released in select cinemas in Ireland and the UK, sees the artist turn the lens on her fractured family, torn apart by grief, a contested inheritance and her mother Nuala's struggle with alcoholism and mental illness.
In the film, Nuala's disappearance is the catalyst for Carten returning home to Donegal from London to search for her and grapple with the weight of an increasingly fraught family dynamic.
It's a powerful, singular piece of work.
A Want In Her is an immersive, deeply personal debut film
Weaving conversations with her family with charming camcorder tapes from her childhood, gorgeously sweeping, cinematic 16mm film footage of Donegal and shots of her work as a visual artist, the film takes a looping, non-linear examination of the effects of addiction on those closest to you. These are not easy themes but Carten handles them with a deft touch, with moments of dark humour and an overriding sense of love and respect for those on the other side of the lens.
She said the deeply personal film happened "very organically".
"I thought I was making a film that was basically an archive of my mother's family because they were all big characters and had great stories to tell," she told RTÉ Entertainment. "It shifted over time because of what was happening with my mother and it became more focused on our relationship and the questions that were being asked of me.
"The film just seemed to grow in scale from the very beginning, so there's a bit of a division between the process of me making the film, which was very intimate, and then the edit and the distribution, which has become a lot bigger than we envisaged."
Originally, the filmmaker expected the story to revolve around her late grandmother's house, which was left in its entirety to her uncle Kevin, rather than being shared among his siblings.
"The heart of inheritance feuds in general tend to be, in Ireland anyway, about mother love and about who the favourite is," she said. "So I actually thought, this is the heart of the onion and we just add layers on the outside."
Carten landed on the colloquial, ambiguous title, A Want In Her, after much deliberation.
"It ties into how the Irish use language as a way to charm, deceive, to not really say what they mean. But there's something within that that also shows how incomprehensible it is and how unpin-downable most of these issues are," she explained.
"Sometimes [labels] like bipolar, which is very useful, doesn't tell the whole story. An addict, alcoholism - doesn't tell the whole story. I wanted something that was open enough that it could become universal and that also it could be applied to anybody, not just my mother."
She said her mother Nuala has always been supportive of the film.
"My mother's mental illness and addiction has taken away a lot of her dignity at times. And I wasn't trying to do that. I was trying to show her as a mother," Carten said. "That was my main drive, not to talk about her alcoholism or talk about why she's mentally ill.
"It was to talk about how I've come to have this relationship with her and the challenges of it and also the beauty of it. And so, her role in film is the mother - it's not the alcoholic, the bipolar one.
"I tried my very best to be both honest and respectful. I tried to focus on the moments where everybody was really doing their best and these issues still were so powerful and domineering.
"Nobody's the baddie or goodie here, it's just that we all are flawed and broken, and how do we survive or thrive within that? She's always been very proud of me being an artist. She encouraged me to go to art school. Even though she doesn't understand what I'm doing half of the time, as she says in the film, she's still really supportive of it."
Despite the exposure that comes with tackling such a personal story, Carten said she didn't feel trepidation and was "guided by my motivation for doing it" which was to "tell the story of the supporting cast member" in the life of a person dealing with addiction.
However, she did struggle with one moment she experienced during the making of the film, when she came across her mother asleep on a bench in Belfast with a bottle of red wine in her hands. Carten struggled with the decision to include the uncomfortable image in the final edit, particularly as she felt a lot of self-judgement around her decision to turn the camera on her mother.
"I don't know why I filmed her - that's the thing that was different. But the walking away from her, I would do that, that was our unwritten agreement," she said. "That's always the way it's been - it's as much to protect her as it is to protect me. That in some way her dignity will be protected by me not seeing her in that state."
She believes the act of making this film changed her approach.
"I've not really spoken about this before, but I was in Belfast, and I came out and there was this woman who was falling asleep on her feet, it was 9am and she'd obviously been out all night," she said.
"I walked past her, but then, because I was working on the film, I came back and checked and she was lying on the ground and I rang the ambulance. I remember thinking, I know that I've changed. Usually my behaviour is, let them do what they need to do.
"But in that instance, I needed to change my behaviour because I know what I did then was not the best response. Also, I don't want to keep picking up a camera in order to try to give myself some sense of control in this dynamic anymore.
"I did it for this film in this period of time, but now I have to deal with my family without recording stuff! But I do forgive myself for doing that. I still don't fully understand it."
Carten recently became a mother herself, welcoming a daughter with her husband. She said it feels like a "fresh start" in her relationship with Nuala.
"She's really enjoying being a grandmother and I think it will definitely change our relationship going forward," she said, adding that, "It's hard to say, I'm just really in the weeds at the minute."
After studying Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London and Central Saint Martins UAL, Carten's work combined documentary and fiction to interrogate how we are compromised by our pasts. From watching this film, it's clear her artistic flair was evident from a young age, although she is self-deprecating about her unearthed childhood videos.
"I shot that stuff when I was 10 and those tapes disappeared for years. I always remembered that being the golden era of my creativity and that I was a genius. And actually, whenever I rediscovered them as an adult, I realized that they were just rip-offs of Nickelodeon shows and Blind Date," she laughed.
Her creativity was encouraged by a primary school teacher, who appears in one of the archive videos in the film.
"She really encouraged us to be creative and to experience the world through creativity," Carten said. "I think that's stayed with me, the idea that creativity could be an outlet, especially around subjects that were difficult to talk about or process.
"But I tried many different things. I became a painter then and I went to art school, I was making big sculptures at the start. But I always wanted to be a filmmaker and somebody recognised that and were just like, 'Stop welding, go out with the camera'.
"And I never really looked back. But I also have always wanted to do fiction. So for a while I was trying to move into that space a little bit. It's something I'd still like to do in the future."
As well as a deep sense of affection for her family, the film is rooted with a distinct sense of place and love for Donegal.
"Donegal is a magical place and part of the magic and the beauty of it, which relates to the film in general, the beauty comes from the barrenness, it's unforgiving. And it also has a certain indifference. All that side of my family, all of my lineage have grown up around Errigal," she explained.
"So there's a sense of being connected to something greater than yourself, but also that something greater than yourself doesn't care about your small human life."
A Want In Her closes out powerfully with beautiful footage of the Donegal landscape and two uniquely powerful Irish songs - Lankum's The Wild Rover and Fontaines D.C.'s A Hero's Death.
She said she felt "so grateful" to have both songs on the soundtrack.
"My husband was the music supervisor and he made a playlist for me, and the first song was The Wild Rover by Lankum," she recalled.
Carten said that as soon as she heard the song she "could see the end" of the film play out. "And then I said to him, 'You need to get this song. We have a six-minute sequence here, if we don't have this song, we're in trouble'.
"And then the Fontaines, I had to write them a letter to try to get the song. I'm so grateful to both of those bands for being involved.
"I don't think they've seen the film, but I hope that they do, because I feel like the film does justice to those songs as much as those songs do justice to the film."
A Want In Her is out in select cinemas in Ireland and the UK now.
