Myrid Carten: Turning the lens on her mother's struggles with addiction and illness
A Want In Her: Nuala Carten and Myrid Carten.
WHEN HER troubled mother goes missing in Ireland, Myrid Carten returns home from London to find her in a new documentary about family, love, and addiction.
The artist and filmmaker goes on to document her family story in a powerful feature debut about loving someone who has addiction and mental health struggles - and not losing yourself in the process.
As well as other family members, Carten trains her lens on her mother Nuala, a bright, funny and loving woman whose life has been blighted by grief, alcoholism and mental illness.
Her mother was part of a large family and as an only child, Carten - who had been shooting family videos since she was a child - had wanted to document their stories.
“I always had this desire to make an archive of my mother's family,” says the Co Donegal filmmaker. “I didn't know what form that would take. She is one of 10, and they're all characters, as we would say in Ireland. Being an only child, I was always fascinated by the dynamics between them.”
Carten moved to London to study Art Foundation at Central Saint Martins and, later, Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths, partly on the advice of Nuala, who felt artists made more interesting films.
Her family started to emerge organically, she says, in her art and short films, and she felt it was something she might explore later in her career. “But then in 2018 my mother's brother had a heart attack and died in his 60s out of nowhere. And I just thought: ‘Ok, if I want to do this archive and collate these stories, this is the time, the time to do it is now’.
“It was very organic, and it was led by intuition, and then there was almost a domino effect with my mother's siblings, where five of them passed away in the space of three years. That had a knock-on effect on my mother, who doesn't deal well with grief anyway, and she started to spiral. She's the underlying impulse driving the work.”
By its nature, is a complex and complicated film. As well as Nuala’s struggles, the filmmaker talks to her uncles Danny and Kevin about family life. Is there a particular responsibility that comes with documenting the lives of family members? “To quote my uncle Danny, you have to make sure it's good. That's the responsibility I felt. I did take full responsibility of the work in terms of, it was my idea.
“There's a desire in documentary and in a lot of art in general, that power dynamics are addressed and are put into balance and so there's a drive for people in documentaries, subjects, to be collaborators. I had to say, from the off, my family are not collaborators. They are definitely participants, and they were so generous with themselves and their lives, but I had to take responsibility for the work, and what I mean by that was I was the one filming it. I was the one making the decisions. I was the one editing it,” she says, adding that she did show them the film on the penultimate cut.
is set in the Irish-speaking townland of Gort a’ Choirce (Gortahork), located in north Donegal. The Errigal Mountains loom large in the film, and the sense of place as well as people feed into the film.
“Place was massive in the film,” says Carten. “There’s the draw in the film of the [family] house, but there's also this draw to Donegal. Donegal is a fascinating place because it's beautiful, but it's very barren. The beauty is in the barrenness and the ruggedness and on how unhospitable it is at times and unforgiving it is at times. In many ways, that draws people closer together, or people become a bit obsessive with each other. In Donegal they would ask ‘cé as tú?’ which means, ‘who are you from?’ Rather than ‘Where are you from?’”
She wanted the setting of her own childhood and her family’s history, she says, to give the sense of perspective and scale that she has long felt Donegal brings. “It makes you realise when you look at these mountains how short our lives are, which is a big theme in the film. My great great great great grandparents lived in the same place, so even though I know that my life is quite a small part of this larger story, I do know that there’s a larger story. There’s an indifference as well to the mountains. There is something that makes you feel connected, but also is kind of indifferent to your existence.”
In very moving scenes towards the end of the film, Carten leans into two pieces of music - Lankum’s and Fontaines DC’s “One of my mother's siblings passed away at the time when the Fontaines’ song came out. It just felt like we had to end it on that song. They were very generous to us and helpful to us when we wrote to them. My husband became the music supervisor. He loves music, and he put together a playlist for me. The first track was by Lankum. I'd heard it before, but I hadn't thought about it in context of the film. Again, they were very generous. And also, they're Irish bands - they’re singing about Irish subjects.”
Carten is already in the early stages of her next project, and she says her ultimate goal is to work in drama. She has a wishlist of actors she admires who include Cillian Murphy, Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan. “Cillian Murphy and Michael Fassbender, I think, are two of the best working actors. And Sasha Ronan is such a chameleon.
“I love drama, and I love the intimacy of fiction, so that's something that I'm looking to go into, but I might make a hybrid work on the way. I'm in very early development for a project that would have certain fictive elements, but is also a hybrid doc, because I feel like that's where the pathway is for me.”
- is released in cinemas on October 10
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