Director Pippa Molony spoke to David Hennessy about the short film Bump, which deals with themes of climate change and motherhood, ahead of its screening at London Breeze Film Festival.
Irish psychological thriller Bump, directed by 26-year-old Castleknock film maker Pippa Molony, and written by and starring Sadhbh Malin, 28, from Dún Laoghaire, will be shown at the London Breeze Film Festival.
It is Molony’s third short film after Clara’s Room and Thicker Than Water. She also directs music videos.
Sadhbh Malin has acted in Conversations with Friends, and Love, Rosie.
Cork actress Alison Oliver, 29, (Saltburn, Conversations with Friends) is executive producer.
The film was financed by Ireland’s Actor as Creator scheme, run by Screen Ireland with Bow Street Academy’s National Screen Acting School and supported by Equity.
It gives €5,000 grants to experienced screen actors based in Ireland to originate, write, perform, and produce their own short films
Bump is about ‘Clo’, a young expectant mother whose world fractures as she worries about what her child’s future might cost the planet, and what the planet might cost her child.
Her instinct to protect her child twists into something darker.
Director Pippa Molony spoke to The Irish World.
Q: Much of the film sees Sadhbh acting alone on screen…
“Yeah, she does. Bump is this character study of ‘Clo’ and a woman unravelling.
“Sadhbh wrote the script. She knew these characters intimately already which was a great benefit because embodying that character and doing quite physical performances, if not done totally well, could feel melodramatic.
“She was able to pull off quite demanding acting and physical acting.
“That is challenging actually to convey in a believable way, I was so impressed with Sadhbh because she’s also a co-producer, as am I, and was wonderful in pre-production for helping organise locations and doing a lot of production work.
“When it came to filming, I hoped Sadhbh could switch all that off when we were shooting so as to get into her character.
“It’s hard to get into a state where she’s able to do things that are not easy feats for an actor.
“She’d be having chats with the camera team, with costume, moments before we’d shoot, checking in, being a producer.
“We’d get the camera up and I’d say, ‘Sadhbh stand by five minutes here, we’re about to shoot’ and she’d be able to switch that off and suddenly become ‘Clo’. I was very impressed.
“As an actor, I love working with Sadhbh because she’s obviously quite strong but also, as the writer, she knew this character so well that when it came to embodying her even in high stress when you don’t have all of the things in place as you might want them to be for a certain scene, she was able to just deliver.
“She was just great in how she performed in the film.”
Q: The central theme is age old in terms of women being criticised, but the climate crisis angle gives it a contemporary edge…
“Yeah, totally, it’s not a completely new conversation. It’s a big philosophical discussion.
“As a young person myself, I’m 26, I think that conversation about having children, autonomy for women, is quite normalised in a nice way.
“Thank God we have choices and we can decide to do things as opposed to feeling forced to do things.
“More and more often I’m finding myself in conversations with people where it’s been expressed that having children, in relation to climate change, overpopulation, is not something they want to do even if they want to have children.
“When we were preparing for this shoot, in the weeks before I kept having these very strange moments where things were like life imitating art.
“I was working part-time in a wine bar, and my colleague went on this rant saying, ‘People shouldn’t have children. It’s terrible. It’s a selfish thing to do. The world is burning’.
“It was all very strange and I was like, ‘It’s funny you say that because I’m thinking about this a lot…’
“It feels quite rich and hopefully people will have a response to this.
“The best thing a short film can do, actually any film, is ask questions to an audience as opposed to answer them.
“If this conversation is happening long after the film ends, then we’ve done our job.”
Q: Another member of your cast is Wicklow actor Kwaku Fortune, 35, whose credits include Normal People and Line of Duty…
“I didn’t know Kwaku very well. I worked on a theatre project called Nest back in 2024 which was a big community project where lots of artists were paired with children and young people in Dublin 15, Blanchardstown, and we made these shows based on the young people we spent time with.
“It was a beautiful, beautiful project and a beautiful experience and not like anything I’d ever done. I don’t know if there’s many things like that.
“I was paired up with Kwaku in a school. We were both working with young people there, so I spent a lot of time with Kwaku playing tag and stuff with him in the yard at school to get close to our young people we were working with.
“He had just had a child himself. He was very funny.
“Obviously he’s a great actor and I’d seen him loads of times, but I didn’t know him very well.
“When we looked at the script, Sadhbh mentioned two people and one of them was Kwaku and I just said, ‘Yeah’ and he said yes and it was like, ‘Okay, great. We know he’ll be amazing so it’s just about getting to the room and having a go.
“I was almost a little bit intimidated by him because I’d seen him in shows and thought he was great. I didn’t have a shorthand with him so much, but I just respected him a lot.
“We did a rehearsal before the shoot and Kwaku and Sadhbh did that first scene together and we improvised it and they were just great immediately.
“They both were in the Lir Acting School in Dublin, and they just had a chemistry because both people are so warm.
“I couldn’t have had a better experience working with someone.
“Kwaku is a dream to work with and great craic.”
Q: There is also a young child actress, Nova Farrelly, who makes a big impact despite not having a huge amount of screen time…
“You’re so right. Compliments to Nova. She was great. She was so, so sweet on set. We shot her scene first.
“Short film, low budget filmmaking, is always a little bit mental getting it all organised because there’s a lot of stuff to shoot and you only have the days you have because you cannot hold on to people for any longer, you have no money to do that, so it was a little bit nerve-wracking when we shot the scene that morning.
“We hadn’t had time to do a rehearsal, but Nova has a little bit of acting experience, so it wasn’t like she’d never done it before.
“She was very, very professional and was straight into it and was great.
“A lot of the footage we used was her first take and without any direction she had a natural instinct about how to do it.
“I love working with children and she just had a nice presence and really good instincts and then in the edit we had a really fun time because there’s a great smile that she does when Sadhbh, ‘Clo’, opens the door and you first see the child, she has this very eerie grin.
“I don’t think we told her to do that, that was something that she did naturally.
“Her character has quite an impact when they have that conversation, it’s a nice bit of comedic leverage in an otherwise dark context.”
Bump will be shown as part of the festival’s Impact short films programme at 10.30am this Saturday 24 October at Theatreship Cinema.
London Breeze Film Festival runs 21- 25 October. For tickets and more information, click here.
