By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
I hate the use of “strong” as a constant descriptor for female characters, it feels so one-dimensional…. I just took inspiration from all the women I’ve known in my life and they can be strong, but also weak, they can be stubborn but also thoughtful.”
It’s Samhain season in North Dublin, and teenaged Char (Hazel Doupe) has some problems. She studies hard, but the bullies at school won’t let up, and with her mother Angela (Caroly Barcken) living with serious mental health issues, if it wasn’t for her stern yet beloved Gran (Ingrid Craigie) and her Uncle Aaron (Paul Reid), Char would be left alone and unsupported. One day, however, Angela transforms dramatically, seemingly “cured” as she wears sunny frocks, cooks dinner and reveals herself as the ever-present mother Char has so deeply missed and longed for. But something isn’t right, and as Samhain night draws nearer, Char learns as much about herself as she does the truth of her mother’s sudden radical transformation….
With its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, in You Are Not My Mother filmmaker Kate Dolan embraces her love of Irish folklore and uses it as the foundations to tell a contemporary tale of very modern horror. In a world where the grim realities of everyday life sit in tandem with more supernatural phenomena, the world that young Char must navigate is a complex, challenging one, where her identity and that of those around her are constantly up for reassessment.
With its wider US release, Dolan took time to speak to us about her film.
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Alexandra Heller-Nicholas: There is such a fierce focus on women, traditional roles and power built into even just the very title of the film, and these issues seem to really riddle the film in ways I find endlessly dense and fascinating. Questions of gender politics, authenticity and an implicit spectrum that runs between threat and safety – it all feels connected to the very word “mother” and how that concept is deployed here. Why was it so important to unpack the complexities of matriarchal power and presence (or lack thereof) with this film?
Kate Dolan: I was raised by a single mother and for most of my childhood we lived with my grandmother. So I have always had very strong matriarchal influences in my life. It was always interesting to me how different the experiences of three generations of Irish women were. My grandmother had to quit her job when she married and she was forced to be a mother, in service to the Catholic state as a childbearer really. Then my mother was a working single mother who was very independent but remnants of that Irish Catholic history still influenced her and how she lived her life. Then for me as a young woman coming of age, and a queer woman too… it again was a different experience. I wanted to try to capture that in the film; the past traumas and struggles of the generations before always being with you and following you, particularly as a woman. In paganism you also have the three-goddess symbol, the maiden, the mother and the crone. They are three distinct figures united in one being. I am my grandmother and my mother and they are also me. We are united by our experiences as women and our history.
While there are so many different folkloric threads running through the film, the connection to witchcraft is one that really stayed with me – I was struck by almost how low-key it was, almost domesticated in such an organic, authentic way. And, of course, how it binds women intergenerationally.
My paternal grandmother always acted as though she was a witch. She would be driving me to the local McDonald’s one minute but then she would say she could perform a widow’s curse for us the next. I love the idea of magic existing in the everyday. In Irish history there were figures known as faery doctors, if you believed someone in your family had come down with some sort of otherworldly malady they would call the faery doctor to heal them. This would be with spells, herbal remedies etcetera. These doctors were often women, “wise women” and very much respected in the community. So Rita (Ingrid Craigie) in the film is somewhat inspired bythis history and my very real witchy grandmother.
I have a really deep research interest in women filmmakers who turn to the figure of the witch, either explicitly or implicitly. Is filmmaking then a kind of witchcraft, magic-making, and either way, for you personally, where does gender fit into that bigger picture?
Oh yes! I love that idea. I feel like creating any art is magic. The idea that you can put together materials to create an image and then that image can make someone feel something so real…it’s beautiful. I just watched Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman recently and I started to weep after. I couldn’t even really pinpoint why but it just brought all these emotions to the fore all of a sudden. That’s magic. In terms of gender, I mean, some of my favourite films of all time are made by men, some by women. I feel like it’s great more women are getting to bring themselves to their work and tell their own stories. I hope though sometime soon we can all just be artists and the idea of being a ‘female’ filmmaker needn’t be stated as much.
That your film premiered so close to Kier-La Janisse’s groundbreaking documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched seems like such perfect timing, there certainly feels like there is something in the air that is making folk horror very much something that is tapping into the current zeitgeist….
I loved that documentary so much! I could have watched it for 6 hours! When I set out to make the film I obviously was inspired by Irish folklore so it was always going to be within the folk horror genre I suppose. Horror movies I think really originate in the fairytale, they are allegorical. Every horror movie comes from mythology really so folk horror is present in a lot of horror I think. I feel with our modern society we are maybe losing the idea of the unknown. Everything is known now. So perhaps people are drawn to folk history because it takes them away from that.
Bullying for me is one of those things that screen culture often gets so wrong in terms of how it is represented and far too often opts for very two-dimensional, patronising binaries. How did you avoid that?
I went to an all girl’s Catholic school and … [it] was ever-present. With girls, particularly, it is less clear who is your enemy and who is your friend – and throughout my schooling friends became enemies and enemies became friends, and then by the end we were all friends really as we shed the insecurities of youth. I wanted to capture that in the film.
Class seems such a major focus in your film; why was it so important to the film’s final punch to set it in this world, and how did you avoid the grotesque “poverty porn” qualities that (in my mind) are still far too pervasive when characters from lower economic brackets are represented in screen culture?
A few people have asked about this and I find it quite funny actually because the areas where we filmed were places I spent my youth, my school was near these estates and so it was the landscape of my upbringing really. In North Dublin the majority of places you go look like this. I was just plucking places and memories from my own life so that’s probably why it feels genuine. Where I’m from, North Dublin, can often be depicted in film and television in Ireland as “poverty porn” as you say. I wanted to see this part of Dublin in a new way as my experience of it growing up was more complex and full of supernatural wonder!
The depiction of Angela’s mental health issues too struck me as so very authentic.
I have had dealings with mental health struggles in my family and it was important for me that any genre beats that featured Angela felt authentically symptomatic of mental illness, so we have this ambiguity as to what is really happening throughout the film. What I really wanted to capture was the effect of that on someone coming of age in a family where this is happening. You can be forced to grow up very quickly and make sense of it all without little guidance. It can be really scary.
I would be amiss here to not ask the question I am sure you have been asked a thousand times already – how did you find so perfect a Char in Hazel Doupe?
Hazel is such a brilliant actress. I saw her in a short film called Ciúnas (the Irish word for quiet) and she delivered a heart-breaking performance in that without much dialogue at all. I knew for Char we needed someone who could deliver a performance just with a look as Char had very little dialogue to articulate herself. When I first zoomed Hazel too she just understood what the project could be and what I wanted so well… it felt like fate!
The idea that a film could keep you up at night looking in the dark corners of your room, staying with you long after the VHS tape ended. I think as I’ve gotten older I have seen why horror is so appealing.”
There’s a nasty habit for “strong female characters” to be misunderstood as being synonymous with things like pluckiness, gutsiness, or literal physical strength, rather than being female characters that are fully fleshed out, complex, complicated and at times even contradictory. Can you share your thoughts with me on how you see the concept of “strength” intersecting with the gender politics of your film?
I hate the use of “strong” as a constant descriptor for female characters, it feels so one-dimensional. As I mentioned, I was raised by amazing women. I don’t think I actively ever said I wanted my characters to be “strong” or X, Y, Z. I just took inspiration from all the women I’ve known in my life and they can be strong, but also weak, they can be stubborn but also thoughtful. Human beings are complex and I hope to always bring that to my characters, regardless of gender. I am just looking for authenticity really!
Finally, a simple question that perhaps demands a not-so-simple answer: why horror? (And yes, I will accept “why not?” as an answer!)
Indeed why not! I have always loved horror. Ever since I was a kid monsters and spooky things have fascinated me. I am still working out why exactly but I think partly it was always the physical thrill of watching horror: The idea that a film could keep you up at night looking in the dark corners of your room, staying with you long after the VHS tape ended. I think as I’ve gotten older I have seen why horror is so appealing. As a filmmaker it allows you to be really creative, you can let your imagination run wild. I also love the allegorical nature of it – that you can discuss big ideas but hide them inside a scary monster. You can explore themes that might be too confronting in a drama film… I feel I will be in the horror space for the foreseeable future certainly!