Kristina
2023 · 2m
Directed by Mac Premo
Genres: biography, documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
A two-minute documentary portrait of Kristina O'Hara McCafferty, a boxer fighting out of Belfast's St. John Bosco Boxing Club and trained by her husband. Mac Premo weaves Eavan Boland's 'Mother Ireland' — recited by O'Hara-McCafferty — through the city's streets and the gym's walls of male predecessors.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects sports docs to pump you up; Premo does the opposite—she's built a two-minute poem about a woman boxer and somehow made it *less* about the fight and more about the ghosts in the room, which is either brilliant or self-sabotaging, and I genuinely can't tell which.
The weaving of Eavan Boland's 'Mother Ireland' through the gym's male lineage creates a formal dialogue between literary canon and bodily practice that feels genuinely considered—this is how you make a micro-portrait that *means* something beyond its subject.
The decision to let O'Hara-McCafferty's voice carry Boland's words over the gym rather than her own narration is the whole film—suddenly you're watching a woman claim a poem as her own inheritance, and two minutes becomes enough.
Reviews
A portrait of Kristina O'Hara McCafferty, Kristina is a concise 2-minute documentary by Mac Premo that delivers a sense of Irish women's history, hinged on Eavan Boland's Mother Ireland. The film uses an alternating rhythm of frenetic energy and calm, while the poem, epic in scale, is recited on the voiceover.