'In Midleton, there used to be this glorious cinema': Adam O'Keeffe on getting into films in East Cork 

As his feature, Horseshoe, opens in Irish cinemas, the Carrigtwohill native explains how he fell in love with the film world 

A scene from Horseshoe, by Cork filmmaker Adam O'Keeffe. 

The filmmaker Adam O’Keeffe, 41, got the movie bug growing up in Carrigtwohill, East Cork. Sitting at home, from the age of five or six, he used to watch films on old VHS tapes on repeat. Gorging on anything he could feast his eyes on, from Fred Astaire tap-dancing in musicals to Robin Hood swashbuckling his way around Sherwood Forest. And once he got inside the doors of a cinema, his imagination ran riot.

“In Midleton, there used to be this glorious cinema where the Farmgate was until recently,” says O’Keeffe. “It was one of those cinemas that had the old red couches instead of individual seats. There were a few decades worth of stickiness on the floor. I remember seeing the first Jurassic Park there around 1993. Whoof. Spielberg in his pomp. When you're that young, that level of awe gets into your bones.” 

O’Keeffe, as screenwriter and co-director, completed his first feature film, Horseshoe, this year. It premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh in the summer, where it picked up the first of several festival awards and commendations, a movie “impossible to forget” in the words of the prestigious Oldenburg International Film Festival selection jury.

The drama unfolds when four estranged siblings, half in love with each other, half at each other’s throats, meet at their family home in Co Sligo to unravel the will left by their deceased father, “a hateful prick”. Chaos ensues. Secrets and violence, in the spirit of Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark, hang in the air, all leavened by black humour.

Adam O'Keeffe is from Carrigtwohill. 

The ensemble cast features The Gone actress, Carolyn Bracken; Jed Murray as the brooding older brother Jer; and John Connors in an inspired piece of casting as a rural solicitor, mar yeah. Several of the actors have previously worked with O’Keeffe and co-director, Edwin Mullane, in short films made by their production company WaveWalker Films, or in theatre productions with The Corps Ensemble, including Mary Murray, Eric O’Brien and Neill Fleming.

Their familiarity working together meant O’Keeffe and his team could hit the ground running when it came to filming. In a sense, Horseshoe was reverse engineered. When the chance to get a three-week film shoot in a magnificent old pile in Co Sligo emerged, O’Keeffe cut his coat to suit his cloth, tailoring a screenplay about a family squabbling over a will, with the cast and location in mind. 

They workshopped the script with their key actors before descending on Sligo, which has rarely looked so glorious on screen. With 15 “shoot days” to work with in early 2024, it was a race against time – and the elements.

“We had exactly seven days where it was even possible to get outdoors,” says O’Keeffe. “It was January on the west coast, which at the best of times is inhospitable. There were storms, blackouts, times where we were reefed up the side of the mountain fighting against fading daylight or storm clouds overhead: ‘If we don't get this done in 10 minutes, we're goosed.’ Skin of our teeth stuff. We were blessed in many ways. We had vehicles dying around us, tire wheels falling off cars, but we got there. Perhaps some of the strife informed the drama, but in a positive way.” 

John Connors in a scene from Horseshoe.

Horseshoe was shot on bare bones funding, with €60,000 required to get raw footage in the can over those three hectic weeks in Sligo, eventually rising to a €250,000 budget once post-production costs were factored in. These included editing; an original score by celebrated Irish composer Anna Mullarkey; sound design; colour mixing; song licensing, including a couple of hypnotic tracks by John Francis Flynn. The resulting film feels like an instant Irish classic, building on recent successes in the Irish film industry.

“There’s been a resurgence in Irish cinema over the last five years,” says O’Keeffe. “Big-ticket films like Kneecap, An Cailín Ciúin or That They May Face the Rising Sun lead the way in promoting Irish cinema, but then there’s this other stratum of films, albeit made on a slightly lower budget level, films like Lakelands or Redemption of a Rogue, which are just as brilliant, and come from a similar background to Horseshoe.

“In all our circumstances, they were independently shot, but then there was support from organisations like Screen Ireland to help get them finished [or promoted]. It means there’s an avenue for independent filmmakers bridging that gap and getting into the consciousness of Irish cinema.”

•  Horseshoe opens in Irish cinemas, including Cork’s The Arc Cinema and Mahon Point Omniplex, Friday, December 5