A love affair with the Burren inspired documentary about the area and the personalities who inhabit it

A love affair with the Burren inspired Katrina Costello to make a moving documentary about the area and the personalities who inhabit it. Hours spent experiencing the extraordinary setting and wildlife of the region led to Costello making her first documentary, The Silver Branch, writes Esther McCarthy.

A celebration of nature, people, and place, the film centres on farmer, poet, and real-life owner of Fr Ted’s house, Patrick McCormack, and the beauty that surrounds him.

It’s a beauty that he’s willing to battle to preserve. McCormack was a member of the Burren Action Group, which went to court to prevent the State building a visitor centre at

Mullaghmore in the 1990s.

“I shot it over five years,. For three of those years it was not a funded project, but more a mother going into the wilderness with the children, a BBQ and a camera. It was a very sacred time to have had with them,” says Costello.

It was a documentary I made to honour my people, the people who farmed close to nature, our heritage, and natural world. Making it never felt like a day’s work and I never ever thought it would get such recognition either here or abroad

“The Silver Branch is not a normal brow-beating conservation documentary, but rather Patrick’s poetry and the story guides us from meditative appreciation to solemn awareness of the vulnerability of our natural wilderness and resources. It’s hard for people to appreciate a thing you have no connection to and no sense that we need to protect it, or that it is a finite resource.”

Costello grew up in a farming family in Kildare before moving to the Burren and marrying Ken O’Sullivan, maker of the documentary series Ireland’s Deep Atlantic.

“He started becoming a filmmaker, so I had access to all the cameras and I’d go up and sit in the Burren. I’d know where all the nests and the dens were, the forest and the woodlands in the mountains where everything was hanging out, and I started filming up there, the natural world.

“It takes a long time for nature to settle down when you go into a landscape. You need to go for three hours really, you need to just sit and be quiet and then nature will settle around you.”

Audiences have particularly responded to the joyful banter in the film between McCormack and local farmer John Joe Conway. Katrina got to witness their sense of fun for herself when Conway sold two cows, Drowsy Maggie and Sporty Nell, to McCormack.

“Everywhere I’ve gone internationally, everybody’s in fits of laughter watching them,” she said. “You can see from the film that John Joe just has a great love for his cows.

“Really what I wanted to do was create a eulogy to the natural world, what I grew up with. John Joe and Patrick, when they’re together they were just the fun elements of it. They had a really contagious laughter and fun.

“But Patrick has that more serious, very insightful side, very heartfelt emotions. I suppose he has a great love for the landscape and the old bachelor farmers. So it was to try and tie that narrative together in a very creative way to tell this story which is a eulogy to our old agrarian culture.”

The Silver Branch will screen at several cinemas nationwide on various dates, including IFI Dublin from Oct 5. It will screen at Cork’s Triskel Arts Centre for four nights from Nov 26