Oliver McGoldrick told David Hennessy about his Academy Award qualified short film Three Keenings which explores grief and the ancient practice of keening.
Three Keenings, the Oscar®-qualified debut short from Northern Irish filmmaker Oliver McGoldrick, screens at the forthcoming Irish Film Festival London.
Grief and other themes in the film are informed by Oliver’s background in emergency medicine.
Three Keenings premiered at the Venice International Film Festival before earning Academy Awards® consideration after winning the Tiernan McBride Award for Best Short Drama at the Oscar®-qualifying Galway Film Fleadh.
Three Keenings follows a struggling actor who becomes a professional mourner on the rural funeral circuit of Northern Ireland.
Moving from wake to wake, he delivers grief as a paid performance until the emotional distance he relies on begins to fracture.
At once darkly comic and deeply human, the story explores mourning as ritual, labour, and theatre.
The lead role is played by Seamus O’Hara who gives a performance much like the one that he gave in the Academy, BAFTA and IFTA- winning An Irish Goodbye. Seamus can also currently be seen in House Of Guinness and Blue Lights.
The film also features an ensemble of celebrated Northern Irish talent including Sean Kearns, Carol Moore, Caitriona Hinds, Niall Cusack, and Olivia Nash.
McGoldrick, a BAFTA North America Scholar and alum of the New York Film Festival Artists Academy was raised outside Belfast and initially worked as a doctor before pursuing filmmaking at the NYU Tisch Graduate Film Program. He is now based between New York and Northern Ireland.
What inspired Three Keenings?
“I was doing my film degree over in New York and as part of our course, we are allowed to just go make a short film about anything and everything.
“I knew I wanted to go back home to make it.
“They don’t put any limitations and they almost encourage you if you want to go back to your own country.
“It’s quite an international programme.
“So I knew I was coming back home to make it.
“I initially wanted to make something around the concept of someone going to a funeral or someone having to come home for a funeral.
“It was initially going to be based around a wake and I started researching into wakes and then when I was looking into wakes I just found out about this thing of keening which used to be part of the funeral rituals.
“I was like, ‘Well, that sounds even more interesting’ so I just started to look into that.
“It’s definitely a thing different cultures have.
“A classmate from India was saying that they have something similar and that there was something similar in the Philippines and Yemen, I think, has their own version of it, and Nigeria.
“There were these different versions all over the world of these people who kind of wail and cry over the dead but aren’t necessarily related to them.
“I kind of thought, ‘That’s an interesting concept if it’s something that happens everywhere’.
“But I hadn’t seen that much about it.
“It was a thing in Ireland for thousands of years but died out in the last century.
“I knew I wanted to make the film modern day.
“I didn’t have a budget to do anything in the past so I was like, ‘I’ll make this film as if this thing was still happening now’.
“I thought, ‘Who would be doing this job?’
“I was like, ‘Oh, maybe an out to work actor would be doing this job as a kind of in between job.”
Great things come from necessity. You say you didn’t have the money to make it period but the magic is inserting this ancient practice into the modern day but with that comes modern day reactions. Seamus O’Hara’s character is accused of being a ‘faker’ by a child and then given a hiding for how he responds to the child..
“Nowadays people are much more suspicious of tradition and religion.
“Lots of people are still religious but now more than back in the day, there’s a kind of scepticism around traditions.
“That allowed to bring in the different shades of how this thing is sort of received.
“Some people sort of think of it as this kind of great quasi-religious thing and then other people are suspicious of these strange people who go around and do this thing for money.”
A lot of the film rests on Seamus O’Hara’s central role as Ian. I am reminded of An Irish Goodbye because I think he is playing a similar character: Someone who is caring for a loved one and in a difficult situation..
“Yeah and it’s funny because I made this film in January 2023 so it was right before An Irish Goodbye kicked off and rightfully so for them. It’s great.
“It was interesting because I’d spent the autumn in New York writing this thing.
“Then I came back home at Christmas and then I had to cast it.
“I was like, ‘I have to cast it in three weeks. That’s a very short period to cast in’.
“I got connected with a casting director who recommended Seamus and I sort of had a phone call with Seamus. Seamus was like, ‘You should watch this short I’ve just been in’.
“And he sent me An Irish Goodbye actually.
“And this was 23 December. It was right before Christmas and all the agents were going to close for the whole two weeks and then I was going to shoot right after that.
“So I was like, ‘I need to cast right now’.
“He sent me the film and then I watched it.
“I was like, ‘Oh, this is great’.
“And then it was while we were on set, it came out that it got nominated for an Oscar.
“I’m happy all that happened before because I’m sure we would have got him anyway but maybe we wouldn’t have got Seamus if he would have already won an Oscar and all that.
“But he was very down to earth and easy going so I’m sure he wouldn’t have been bothered.
“He was very easy going and understood the story and seemed like he would be up for collaborating.
“He understood that this was going to be low budget.
“It was made with lots of my friends so he had to understand that it would be made like that.
“And then that’s the same with all the other actors.
“They were all theatre actors mainly.
“A lot of them have worked extensively in the Lyric in Belfast and so they all knew each other over the years.
“In fact Seamus used to be the barman of the Lyric when they were all working there, they kept telling me.
“I thought that was funny.”
You went from being a doctor to being a film maker, how does that experience of being a doctor inform your story telling?
“Anyone who works in the NHS or any medical system, I suppose, but one that’s extremely busy and always understaffed, you have to develop this graveyard sense of humour about everything that’s going on because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to keep doing it.
“I think that working in A and E for years really makes you have a graveyard sense of humour, you sort of are finding the funny side of things.
“You have to and obviously if someone maybe overheard you, they wouldn’t understand.
“It’s a dark sense of humour that you have to develop.
“The other side of it is working in A and E means you just see all sorts of people all day, every day: All ages, all walks of life, all emotional states and so, subconsciously, in an anthropological sense, you see everything.
“Not that I realised it at the time but that really informs lots of characters, just all these different types of people.
“And then also working on a film set, especially a student film set, can feel like life and death a lot of the time.
“Having done that job, I hope it gives me a bit of context, that this is super important but it lets me see it in a better context.”
Having worked so hard to become a doctor, it must have been something strong that pulled you away from it to this more creative field..
“Yeah, I still don’t have a really good answer for why I just decided to leave it and be like, ‘Right I’m away to New York’.
“But I always really, really loved films.
“I suppose like lots of people maybe until recently, I never thought of it as a viable career.
“It just never even crossed my mind that that would be a possibility.
“It was only when I was working as a doctor, and I obviously enjoyed that as well, I always had this idea maybe to look into doing filmmaking.
“I just found this course online basically just by Googling and looked into it.
“It still didn’t feel like a reasonable sort of idea, realistic kind of thing, to just drop everything and move to New York but I just applied.
“And then somehow I got an interview and then somehow I got in.
“Then I realised how expensive it is to go to American University.
“I was horrified.
“I’d never looked into that part of it and then I had to defer a year and it worked out well because then COVID hit and I rightfully had to stay and work over COVID.
“I waited a year, saved the money and then sort of eventually moved out there.
“I didn’t save enough money obviously because you can never save enough money for American college, it’s horrendous.”
As a doctor you must encounter the extreme joy and tragedy, probably all in one day. The mix of tragedy and humour is also in the film, isn’t it?
“Yeah, definitely.
“That’s something that I wanted to bring into this story, the film that I made.
“You’re exactly right.
“In the space of a couple hours, you see the absolute peaks and then the absolute troughs in terms of people going through these things but it also always shocked me how sometimes people can even be kind of grimly funny even in the worst of circumstances.
“Even when people are going through the toughest things or the most intense and stressful things I always notice that the comedy is always right there on the edge of it.
“People can crack these jokes a lot of times and you’re like, ‘How can you be in that headspace?’
“But It’s a way of coping with it and comedy is right beside tragedy.
“That always kind of surprised me.
“The whole idea of filming and showing this ceremony of keening, because it’s people ostensibly screaming and crying but if you take a step back from it you’re like, ‘This is sort of funny, this is sort of ridiculous’.
“And it was just sort of bringing those two feelings together.
“That was the goal from the outset of it.”
A big thing in the story is the expectations or even theatricality of grief..
“Yeah, absolutely.
“The main question of the film is, what does grief look like?
“Grief to someone is standing stony faced and not reacting.
“And grief to someone else is crying and then there’s that kind of dissonance.
“When you look at someone, do you know they’re grieving or someone grieving performatively, someone doing it as a job?
“I’ve seen all sorts of reactions to grief and illness and even mortality, and I don’t just mean in work, I mean sort of in personal life.
“But you see people who find out they’re unwell and they’re kind of at peace with it.
“And then you see people who are terrified and people who are just completely blocking it out and it’s not happening.
“And it is just those responses to being faced with your mortality, if that’s your own mortality or that of a loved one.”
There comes a time in the film when Seamus’ Ian does break down, he genuinely lets it all out and it is perceived as being a performance..
“Yeah, definitely.
“Seamus had to break down for real in that moment.
“We were talking about, ‘How is this going to be distinguishable because we’ve seen you crying earlier on? We saw you crying at the start of the film but in this moment, we have to believe that you’re actually crying for real.
“And obviously the scene previous helps with that because we can see a dramatic scene and we can see there’s something going on with him and his father who’s ill.
“But I initially was sort of worried because we saw him crying very loudly and overtly at the start.
“I was like, ‘Does that mean he has to cry silently? Does that have to be a thing?’
“And then in the end, that was just completely overthinking it because what we connect with in the audience is genuine emotion that doesn’t feel performative and he was able to show that in his performance.
“I’ve been at a few screenings of it and there’s never laughter at that moment when he’s crying and then as soon as we cut to the lady sitting beside him, there’s always laughter because it’s just this idea that someone has just had this most emotional breakdown and there’s just someone sitting beside them waiting for the bus not knowing what to do.
“Hopefully that scene works and it has both of those parts, the drama and the comedy.”
How have you found the reactions to the film more generally?
“The best reaction I’ve had of any screening was when it screened at Galway.
“That was the first screening back here in Ireland and the reaction there was amazing.
“People were really, really laughing and then people seemed very affected by the other parts and afterwards I had lots of really nice comments.
“That means more.
“That means the most to me because you’re making it from your own kind of cultural perspective and so when I was showing it to people from my culture and they appreciate it, that means a whole lot.
“Some people really connect with it.
“Some people don’t.
“It’s just been my first encounter with that and the good comments and the not so good ones are always interesting.”
Out of interest did you happen to see keening feature in Traitors Ireland recently?
“Yeah, I think when I was making this film, no one really seemed to know much about keening.
“I’d say it was fertile ground for people to explore.
“I’m writing a feature version of Three Keenings but I kind of think I might be beaten to the post by some other things which is just the way it goes.”
Are you looking forward to screening at this month’s Irish Film Festival London?
“I’m very, very pleased and honoured that they’re going to screen it.
“I think I’m actually shooting over the dates, otherwise I would try and come over because I love London and it would be great to see it again in that atmosphere.
“But I think I’ll be struggling making another short.”
Three Keenings screens 8.40pm Thursday 13 November at the ICA in the New Irish Shorts 1 programme of Irish Film Festival London.
Irish Film Festival London runs 12- 16 November.
For more information, click here.
