The 38th Foyle Film Festival (FFF) opened on Wednesday 19th November with a screening of Lance Daly’s latest film TRAD.
A full house engages in a very warm, frank and informative q&a with writer/producer/director Daly and two cast members. They share insights into their experiences which go much wider than just one film. They illuminate the work, the sacrifices and pleasures, the decisions, set backs, joys and woes of film-making.
It makes for a splendid film festival evening, the epitome of what such an event could be, ably handled by festival director Christopher Morrison. The FFF welcomes Daly back from a previous occasion when he screened one of his first films, early in the festival’s 38 year history.
His previous film to TRAD is Black 47, made in 2018, drawing a deserter from British imperial wars in Afghanistan back to his famine-ravaged home in Connemara, where he enacts vengeance, on behalf of his stricken family, on the local soldiery and landlords.
TRAD is a very different film, though set once more in the west of Ireland, within an Irish-speaking family, where the mother is a driven music and dance teacher and the father is an easy-going musician. It is a coming-of-age film for the young woman, Shona McAnally (Megan Nic Fhionnaghaile), who is bursting to get away from the round of féilte, fleadhanna, lessons and rehearsals under her mother’s oppressive drive. Her younger brother Mickey (Dallán Woods) tags along when Shona hooks up with a van-load of summer bohemians, playing music, camping on beaches and ‘having the laugh’, until Shona ‘shifts’ the handsome banjo player in his tent.
Mickey calls his Mammy on his hidden phone. Micky goes home.
Shona walks away from the van and is joined by a shy young guitarist, Ray (Cathal Coade Parker), who has been aching to talk to her. They walk, hitch, busk and camp. He has a decent tent, being a college student from a family with a few bob. They busk south through Mayo and into Galway, as friends and fellows. They reach Galway city and the tension within and between them erupts at Spanish Arch, in a scene beside the Claddagh, where they pitch for the last time.
Shona destroys her fiddle, in a rage of frustration.
The resolution follows with Shona re-joining her family as a grown-up young woman, though she still wears the hapless green dress her mother gives her for performing at the Fléadh in Mullingar. All elements of the summer journeying are united in a fantastic pub session, with multiple instruments of the Irish tradition and some fine sean-nós dancing. That scene, actually shot in the Four Provinces Pub in Dublin, is a triumph of film-making and editing, fair play to Lance Daly and his colleagues.
The acting is terrific, the scenery is marvellous, the story is thin, but works and the music throughout is tremendous. The editing and direction are superb. Still, I left the cinema unsettled. I cannot recommend the film.
I was unsettled by the character Harky (Aiden Gillen). He was the clearest manifestation of coercive control I’ve seen on screen for a while. He is older than the others. He owns and drives the van. Having offered a lift home to Shona and Mickey, he drives past their house, then asks Shona to stay on. He doesn’t force her, but he doesn’t make it easy for her to get off. Mickey follows along, until he feels abandoned. The crack goes out of it.
Harky takes all their phones. He controls communication with the outside world. He controls the money, producing a wad of cash when someone says they need food. This moment provides a great slice of dialogue:
- Did you rob a bank?
- No, the banks rob us.
Harky takes them to his base, an isolated ruin, with a large pond in the middle. It is just the spot for someone half-cut to fall into. Someone like Mickey, gargling bottles of booze. Harky regales them all with lists of random words and riddles, never answering a question, passing this off as wisdom, when it has all the characteristics of the worst of cultism: hem the acolytes in, set yourself up as the wise-beyond-comprehension guru, control all aspects of their lives.
Mickey and Shona are lucky to get away from him.
This soured the film for me. I should have asked Lance Daly the question:
Why did you choose an instance of coercive control to launch the young people’s road-trip?
TRAD – recommended? See Black 47 instead.
TRAD; film; Lance Daly; Monto Movies; Ireland, 2025
www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter
