Meet The Filmmaker: Ken Wardrop, director of So This is Christmas, at Cork Film Festival
Ken Wardrop's latest documentary, So This is Christmas, shows at Cork International Film Festival.
Ken Wardrop is a filmmaker from Portarlington, Co Laois.
His latest documentary, So This Is Christmas – in which ordinary people in an Irish village talk about their relationship with the festive season - has been nominated in the Best New Irish Feature award of Cork International Film Festival, supported by the Irish Examiner.
Previously, Wardrop’s heartwarming films have included His & Hers, and lockdown documentary Cocooned. The festival runs Nov 9-26; for screening details, see https://corkfilmfest.org/.
I’m from Portarlington and I’m a farmer’s son. I was the black sheep of the family in that context because my two brothers went into farming.
I ended up by fluke getting into filmmaking. I ended up living with someone then who was studying film and I started helping her with projects she was doing for college.
In college, then, I got opportunities to actually make stuff and I started looking into documentary filmmaking and making films about my family.
My history with the Cork International Film Festival goes back a long way.
Years ago I sent a bunch of films I had made in school to compete in the shorts category and they decided to put on screenings of all my work.
They entered my graduation film, Undressing My Mother, for the international competition and, unbelievably, it won.
It then won the European Film Academy Award which I’m very proud of.
It’s sort of poignant this year too because that film is about my Mum and this year my Mum passed away and I still remember her being in the audience laughing.
I was always more of a TV fan than anything else. I do recall watching this programme called The Family, this fly-on-the-wall documentary-style film, and it was the first time I’d ever seen something like this, something so raw and gritty and realistic.
I remember the mother washing the son in the sink and me and my family were just laughing so hard because this was our life we were seeing on screen.
That definitely influenced my work going forward.
Smoked Sauna Sisterhood. It’s based in Estonia and it’s about ladies sharing their life stories in a sauna and it’s such a beautifully moving portrait of femininity.
I was so moved by it. So gorgeously filmed and so sensitive, it’s incredible.
Just more synergy across all the different bodies. I wish there was more of an opportunity for the documentary to exist more frequently on the big screen as well as the small screen.
Unfortunately because of the population and lack of demand for it we don’t have the same arthouse platform that they would have in the UK.
When I think back to my introduction to storytelling in its purest form it’s in the kitchen with my mother doing her friends' hair and all the women in the kitchen giggling as they told tales.
They had the gift of entertaining with stories.
My mother in particular had this knack for telling stories about nothing but making them so witty and entertaining.
She could make us laugh and cry at the turn of a phrase or sentence.
It’s the simple, beautiful conversations over a cup of tea.
Those stories were so rich and they were always deep down about love, connection and simplicity of life which is so familiar to all of us.
That’s really what connects all my films is ordinary people telling their ordinary yet fascinating stories.
