Helen

Over the past 4 years, Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor have been working on a project called Civic Life. Civic Life involved local community groups in the production of nine high-quality short films for the cinema, shot on 35mm cinemascope making extensive use of the long take. In 2004, their film Who Killed Brown Owl won the award for Best British Short Film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. In January 2008, their 9th and latest short film Joy won the Prix UIP at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Helen is the culmination of the Civic Life series and the first feature film directed by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor.For us, it's very difficult to talk about Helen without reference to the short films that preceded it. They were all shot on 35mm, they predominantly used long takes and they mostly featured people from local communities with little or completely no acting experience. The only key addition is that for Helen we wanted to concentrate more on character and narrative. Given Helen's personal history she is both complex and private, perhaps untrusting. We rarely see her emoting or showing to others how she really feels. We felt this was an honest thing to do with her character. The emotion is quite hidden because given who she is and the past she has it makes perfect sense that this would be so. At its most basic we hope the viewer will agree that Helen is a gentle and tender story of a girl trying become an adult.