Shergar
2020 · 7m · Denmark
Directed by Cora Mckenna
Genres: coming-of-age, crime, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Conor lives a fast-paced, free-roaming life with his friends on the streets of Dublin. But a life without responsibilities can't keep his head above the chaos of his poverty-stricken home, and torn between what he should do and what his hectic life pushes him into, he doesn't always get a good choice.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like every Dublin street-kid story in the festival circuit, and McKenna doesn't subvert it—she commits to it with such straight-faced sincerity that it almost circles back to interesting, but not quite.
A competent addition to the lineage of British-Irish social realism, with assured handheld cinematography and a steady emotional register, though it doesn't interrogate its own formal traditions or push against the weight of its influences.
McKenna's real discovery is how she lets silences and reaction shots do the moral arithmetic—there's a single moment where Conor's face reflects a choice he hasn't made yet, and the camera holds just long enough to make poverty feel like paralysis rather than narrative setup.