The Arts Council is pleased to announce the successful recipients of Film awards in 2022.

Susan Thomson and Motherland are the successful recipients of its two 2022 Reel Art Awards.

Reel Art is the Arts Council's long-running creative arts documentary scheme. The two successful films will premiere at the Dublin International Film Festival in February 2024.

Padraig Trehy is the successful recipient of the Authored Works award in 2022.

Authored Works is an Arts Council initiative which is designed to provide film artists with the creative and editorial freedom to make an authored cultural film work.  The successful project will premiere at the IFI in 2024. 

Authored Works 2022 Recipient details

Stupid August

Writer/Director: Padraig Trehy 

STUPID AUGUST is a silent historical fantasy which utilises elements of fact and conjecture and mixes them in a hybrid of expressionism, surrealism and pantomime. The ancient and sacred figure of the clown, forces us to confront things others wished we’d forget.

Padraig Trehy Padraig Trehy is a filmmaker, writer and teacher based in Cork.  2016 saw the release of his first feature film Shem the Penman Sings Again about the real and imagined relationship between James Joyce and the tenor John McCormack. The film premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh and played festivals around the world, had a limited cinema release and garnered acclaim from cinema and literary critics. 

Over the past twenty years Padraig has divided his time between teaching film at Crawford College of Art and Design and making a number of short films and documentaries which have been funded variously by RTE, The Cork Film Centre, The Arts Council, TG4, and the BAI, including The Headstones of Seamus Murphy (2001); Trying to Sell Your Soul, When the Devil Won’t Listen (2003); My First Motion Picture (2004); The Kings of Cork City (2006); A Quiet Revolution (2014); and The Music Club (2016). During this time he also created a number of works for theatre including celebrations of the work of Charles Bukowski (Play the Piano Drunk, 2001); Allen Ginsberg (Howl, 2006) and Leonard Cohen (The Future, 2008) all of which integrated new writing with existing archival material. 

He is currently completing an experimental documentary about his late uncle who got caught up in the IRA terror campaign of the 1970s entitled The Ghost Dance of Little Crowe, which is due for release in 2023.

Reel Art 2022 recipient details

Don’t Forget to Remember

Director:  Ross Killeen

Producer:  Louise Byrne/Motherland

Don’t Forget to Remember is an unconventional documentary film featuring the artist Asbestos and his journey through the slow decay of his mother’s memories as they disintegrate from her advancing Alzheimers.

Ross Killeen is a film director based in Dublin. He founded the award winning production company, Motherland which works across film, commercials and music.Through Motherland Ross has produced a number of films and music videos. His debut feature documentary as director Love Yourself Today, which centred on the music of Damien Dempsey, had a nationwide cinematic release in Ireland. The film was nominated for an IFTA and also played all over the UK, New York and Australia. Brian Eno quoted in relation to the film “I have seen no better film about the social value of art”. Killeen’s other films include 99 Problems and Becoming men. 99 Problems was a short documentary which looked at the murky underworld of the Dublin ice cream business. The film premiered at Tribeca film festival in New York and won the audience award at DIFF. It also played at Sheffield film festival and Raindance in the UK. Becoming Men was Killeen’s first short film and put his company, Motherland on the map as a maker of authentic documentary films that resonate with an audience.

Louise Byrne has been working as a Producer for Motherland since 2015 working with brands such as RTE, Irish Rail, Supervalu and Gomo. In 2016, together with Motherland Director, Ross Killeen developed a film department through which she has produced feature films such as Love Yourself Today and Relentless: The Connacht Way, as well as award winning shorts such Call Me Mommy and 99 Problems. She is currently developing several features and shorts with Motherland.

The Swimming Diaries

The Swimming Diaries is a memoir, exactly 25,000 words long, and each word represents a stroke, that is the 25,000 metres or strokes I swam during the month when my Mum was dying. The film translates my book again, back into movement, hovering between experimental conceptual documentary and fiction, exploring memory and grief. A hybrid film using dance, soundscape, water imagery and archive video, including of the musicals she directed, The Swimming Diaries is structured like a piece of music, with refrains and repetitions, the many translations it offers point also to the transformation from life to death

Writer and Director:  Susan Thomson

Producers:  Jen Dunbar, New Decade; Susan Thomson

Executive Producers:  Nuala Cunningham, New Decade

Susan Thomson works across the formal boundaries of film, literature and visual art, recently writing, filming and directing Ghost Empire § Belize (2021), the third in the Arts Council funded award winning Ghost Empire series, which explores legal challenges to British colonial laws criminalising LGBTQ+ people in Northern Cyprus, Singapore, Belize and Mauritius. The series has screened widely internationally including at Anthology Film Archives, New York, Kashish Mumbai Queer International Film Festival, Scottish Government, Edinburgh, INIVA, London, Yale NUS and MICGénero Film Festival, Mexico City. Ghost Empire § Belize (2021) premiered at the IFI Documentary Festival in 2021 before touring film festivals internationally including CAMRA, Penn, Liberation Docfest, Bangladesh, Catalyst International Film Festival and Irish Film London. The film won two IndieFest awards in 2021, an Award of Recognition (Documentary feature) and an Award of Merit (Liberation/Social Justice/Protest). Susan was British Council Plural artist in residence in Brazil in 2022, exploring issues of ecocide law and LGBTQ+ rights, and wrote and directed a dance docufiction Tybyra and the Harlequin (2022) which premiered at the Cinemateca, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro in December 2022. Her poetic memoir ‘The Swimming Diaries’ was exhibited and then sold for many years at Artbook@MoMA PS1 New York. susanthomson.co.uk

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