Clíodhna, for me, is a love letter to the Irish language. Created as part of my final-year project while studying in Berlin, the film explores the question: What is the true value of language?—with a particular focus on my own endangered mother tongue, Irish.

To lose a language is to lose part of ourselves—our identity, our worldview, and our connection to the world around us. The Irish language holds within it ways of seeing and understanding the world that have evolved over millennia—expressed through rich figurative language, myth, and legend.

Inspired by this, I set out to create a story that brings this deeper, often unseen connection into a contemporary setting—where the boundary between our lived reality and a more mystical realm can be traversed through language. It’s through this crossing that we find meaning, belonging, and a profound link to everything that is, was, and is yet to come.