Noticias

Irish filmmaker Myrid Carten’s feature documentary A Want In Her scooped the audience award at the 23rd Dublin International Film Festival (Diff) on Sunday, March 2.

The film follows the filmmaker on a search for her missing mother, also won the documentary award. It premiered at International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2024.

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“As is true of many of the most important things in life, I didn’t know if this film would work,” said Carten. “Many great people had to take a risk for this film to exist. So it is such a delight to have...

Sales agent Syndicado has boarded Irish debut filmmaker Myrid Carten’s “A Want in Her,” which had its world premiere earlier this month in IDFA’s International Competition section.

In the documentary, Carten returns from London to Ireland to look for her troubled mother Nuala. Once a successful social worker, Nuala suffered a mental breakdown after the sudden death of her own mother. She shuffles between rehab clinics, psychiatric hospitals, and occasionally the street.

Her search takes her into a feuding family. “Intimate, surprising, and often darkly funny conversations with her mother and other family members reveal the trials of loving someone who struggles with addiction and madness,” according to a press statement.

Home videos from Carten’s childhood and recordings of video installations from her current work as an artist form a “playful blend” of fictional and documentary elements, which “compellingly capture the vicious cycle of care and rage.

On a busy Belfast shopping street, in broad daylight, filmmaker Myrid Carten observes a woman slumped on a sidewalk bench, her head hidden in a gray hoodie, her right hand clasping a bottle of red wine. Pedestrians walk past, either ignoring the hunched figure or casting her a fleeting glance of concern before carrying on with their day. Carten keeps her camera on her, in transfixed recognition — for the woman is her mother Nuala, identifiable to her daughter only by the high-heeled boots on her unsteady feet. No approach is made, no greeting shouted, no gaze returned. Later, Carten admits to feeling guilt at filming her mother as though she were a stranger, before walking away. But as her raw, searing documentary “A Want in Her” eventually makes clear, theirs is a relationship defined by safe and unsafe distances. Absence, if it doesn’t make the heart grow fonder, sometimes keeps it intact.