Movies

“I’ve just got back from Munich and I’ll be heading to Montreal and then Los Angeles very shortly,” says Conor McDermottroe over the phone from his East London base. He’s working the international festival circuit hard with his new movie Swansong: Story of Occi Byrne, which is also the first full-length feature from this actor, playwright and director.

The international festival tour reflects the international talent and financing behind this atmospheric and deeply emotional picture, which was an Irish-German co-production and received backing from several European cultural funds. “It’s one of those ‘Europudding’ films,” observes McDermottroe, “as it was my first feature, I had to accept funding from wherever I could get it. I originally wrote it as a one-man stage play, then a German TV producer saw it being performed at the Galway Arts Festival a few years ago. He immediately got in contact and told me he thought it was a great film and he wanted to help make it happen.” That producer was Hermann Florin, and he and McDermottroe have since formed a close working relationship, with a view to collaborating on future projects.

The titular character of the movie is the fragile but loving son of troubled single mother Bridget (an excellent, gritty performance by Jodie Whittaker) who battles personal demons and social stigma while raising her child in the conservative surroundings of 1970s Sligo. Ultimately, this troubled upbringing creates a troubled individual, and after suffering a head injury while being bullied as child, Occi finds it difficult to control his temper and finds himself committed to a grim mental institution. But this is only the beginning, not the end, of his tale, and the audience lives a series of ups and downs with the young man (played as an adult by a hypnotic Martin McCann) as he comes to terms with both his potential and his limitations.

The film touches on many of the headline problems that have blighted Irish society in the recent past, including alcoholism, poor psychiatric care and stifling conservatism, but McDermottroe says that it is primarily about the character of Occi and his journey, as opposed to a wide-ranging social critique. “I didn’t personally have to deal with the kind of issues Occi is faced with, but there was a whole gamut of things happening in the schools I attended, so it was very hard to ignore them,” he says. “My memories of three or four guys in school who suffered greatly from having an absent parent definitely come through in the character of Occi.”

Swansong has been screened at several film festivals in Ireland and abroad, and McDermottroe says a strong emotional connection with the lead character is almost always evident. “By the end of the film, they are so involved with Occi’s journey that they really empathise with him and are willing him to move on and get a handle on the issues in his life. The other thing people have remarked in is how unusual the path of the story is and how it doesn’t take the obvious route. As a storyteller, that’s a very pleasant thing to hear.”

So how did McDermottroe find the transition from short films to a feature-length production? “I was definitely nervous at first, each of my shorts were 5-day shoots, so moving up to a 29-day shoot was a bit daunting. But once we got down to Sligo and got the green light, I loved every minute of it – I can’t wait to do it all over again!”

McDermottroe currently has two screenplays in the works, one based on a play he wrote about ‘a down and dirty love triangle in Berlin,’ while the other he describes as ‘a working-class culture-clash comedy set in Sligo again.’ He admits that these are ‘scary days’ financially for anyone working in the arts, but with Swansong about to go on general release, he could well find a lot more doors opening for him in the not-too-distant future.