Ciúnas
2019 · 13m · Ireland
Directed by Tristan Heanue
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
An Irish-language short following a couple as they drive to the city to collect their daughter in the middle of a family crisis, focusing on the parents and how they cope with the situation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A quiet Irish-language family drama about driving to collect a daughter—it sounds like a festival circuit inevitability, which is exactly why I'm suspicious it'll bore me, though I'm genuinely curious whether Heanue finds something genuinely strange in the silence between these parents.
Ciúnas exemplifies the rigorous European short tradition—minimal plot, maximum emotional weather—where language (Irish, rarely heard in cinema) and the formal constraint of the car's geometry become the film's actual argument about family and collapse.
The choice to set almost everything inside that vehicle, letting the landscape scroll past while the parents' crisis stays compressed and intimate, is the exact kind of spatial decision that transforms a modest premise into something that feels inevitable and new.
Reviews
They just proceeded to make small talk even though they both looked like they had a million things they wanted to say to her and ask her. It just stuck in my head, that old Irish thing of not being able to express your feelings or say what you feel.