FRÉwAKA
Feature Film - 103min (2024)
Haunted by a personal tragedy, home care worker, Shoo, is sent to a remote village to care for an agoraphobic woman who fears the neighbours as much as she fears the Na Sídhe – sinister entities who she believes abducted her decades before. As the two develop a strangely deep connection, Shoo is consumed by the old woman’s paranoia, rituals, and superstitions, eventually confronting the horrors from her own past.
Director: Aislinn Clarke
Screenplay: Aislinn Clarke
Cinematography: Narayan Van Maele
Editing: John Murphy
Production Design:Nicola Moroney
Original Score: Die Hexen
Cast: Clare Monnelly, Bríd Ní Neachtain, Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya
Produced by: DoubleBand Films – Diarmuid Lavery
Co-produced by: Wildcard – Patrick O’Neill
With support of: Screen Ireland, TG4, Coimisiun na Mean
PRESS QUOTES
“Fréwaka is a work which sweeps you away from the very first frame; an unforgiving account of traumas which can’t be overcome or even tamed without facing up to horrors of the past.”
Cineuropa
”An eerie female-centric addition to the genre”
“But it’s the mythical and political Irish context of “Fréwaka” that makes it stick, as it draws on lingering national guilt over the iniquities of the Magdalene laundries, and twists deep-seated folk imagery into uncanny nightmare fuel.”
