Irish Oscar Entry Acquired By Super – Deadline

Super has taken North American rights to Colm Bairéad’s award-winning drama The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin), which was recently announced as Ireland’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards and selected for the 2022 European Film Awards.

The film is based on the story “Foster” by Irish author Claire Keegan, who has just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s set in rural Ireland in 1981 and follows the quiet, neglected girl, Cáit (Catherine Clinch), who is sent away from her overcrowded, dysfunctional family to live with her mother’s relatives for the summer. She blossoms in their care, but in this house where there are meant to be no secrets, she discovers one painful truth.

The Quiet Girl premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix of the Generation Kplus International Jury for Best Film. It then claimed the Audience Award and Best Irish Film award at the Dublin Film Festival and went on to garner seven Irish Film & Television Academy Awards including Best Film, Director and Lead Actress. Pic has had a highly successful run in Irish and UK cinemas, via Break Out Pictures and Curzon respectively, recently passing €900k at the box office to become the highest-grossing Irish-language film of all time, and one of the most critically and commercially successful Irish films of recent years.

The film was developed and produced as part of the Cine4 Irish-language feature film scheme. It was financed by Screen Ireland, the Irish-language broadcaster, TG4, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland through its Sound & Vision Funding Scheme, and Section 481 funding. Bairéad adapted the screenplay, with Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett, Michael Patric and Kate Nic Chonaonaigh rounding out the cast. Cleona Ní Chrualaoi produced for Inscéal, the production company she established alongside Bairéad in 2012.

“We are thrilled to be partnering with SUPER in bringing The Quiet Girl to North America,” said Bairéad. “As Ireland’s official entry for the 95th Academy Awards, we can’t wait to begin this new chapter and look forward to working with Darcy [Heusel] and Dan [O’Meara] in connecting a whole new audience with our film.”

An offshoot of Neon, Super earned its first Oscar nomination in 2021 for Jasmila Zbanic’s Quo Vadis, Aida?, which secured a slot in the category of Best International Feature Film. The label’s principals Darcy Heusel and Dan O’Meara were the team behind Honeyland, which was the first non-fiction feature to land Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary and Best International Feature Film in the same year, and Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda, which was also shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature. Super more recently released Bianca Stigter’s critically acclaimed documentary Three Minutes – A Lengthening, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and went on to play at Telluride, TIFF and this year’s Sundance Film Festival.