Following the award-winning success of his short films, two-time IFTA nominee Nathan Fagan is developing several full-length features, including the very personal Spindrift.
“It’s quite heavily biographical,” the writer/director says of the project, which is in development with Screen Ireland. “When I was a teenager, I met my father for the first time. He was this exciting and unusual person. He’d been a novelist and a poet but, when I met him, he was struggling with a heroin addiction. So it’s about trying to capture the complexity of having someone like that in your life.”
Complicated characters are a staple of Fagan’s work, with short film Mud Queen — made with his frequent directing partner Luke Daly — telling the story of a son’s relationship with his unpredictable mother. It won the audience award at Dublin International Film Festival in 2023 and went on to be IFTA nominated. The pair had previously received an IFTA nomination in 2021 for Flicker, which charts a young man’s attempts to deal with trauma.
Dublin-born Fagan was inspired to pick up a camera while studying for a masters in philosophy and came across James Longley’s Iraq In Fragments. “It was a beautiful film. Very poetic, and he had shot it all himself,” says Fagan. “I think it was my first exposure to DIY filmmaking. It opened my eyes to the fact you could go out there and just do it.” He began to teach himself filmmaking and before long had teamed up with Daly on music videos and shorts.
This year, Fagan’s animated prison documentary, Inside, The Valley Sings, was named best animated short film at Dublin International Film Festival. The filmmaker is also developing feature Let Your Body Speak with Keeper Pictures, a psychological horror film that is “about the clash of values in small-town Catholic Ireland”.
As for his own philosophy, Fagan says, “I’m keen to see dramas that are set in Ireland but that are not necessarily about being Irish and that are getting an international audience. A lot of my work is to show Ireland in a way that I know personally, and the diversity of experiences.”
Contact: Nathan Fagan
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