In ‘The Quiet Girl,’ a history making film for Ireland

By LINDSEY BAHR AP Film Writer

Irish filmmaker Colm Bairéad discovered Claire Keegan’s novella “Foster” a little later than most.

The “long short story,” as Keegan likes to call it, is told through the eyes of a 9-year-old girl in rural Ireland who leaves her overcrowded, neglectful family in the summer of 1981 to live with distant relatives — an older, childless couple. There, she experiences love and care for perhaps the first time in her life.

Now playing

“The Quiet Girl” is playing at the Roxy Theater. It’s 96 min., in Irish and English with subtitles.

Published in The New Yorker in 2010, it won several awards and garnered comparisons to Seamus Heaney’s poetry and William Trevor’s stories.

Bairéad’s adaptation, “The Quiet Girl,” has become no less significant and is proving to be a watershed moment for Irish cinema. Not only has it broken box office records in Ireland and the U.K., but it’s also the first Irish language film to compete for an Oscar.

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And it might not have been possible had Bairéad encountered the story any earlier. It was in 2018 when he spotted it on a best

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