Looking back: Two Irish grannies inspire Oscar-nominated short film

Dublin woman Louise Bagnall, the 33-year-old writer and director of Late Afternoon, one of five animated shorts vying for the statuette at the Academy Awards on Monday week, says that because her two grandmothers died when she was aged 10 and 16, she began to wonder about the rich lives they had lived, which she had never had an opportunity to question them about.

That curiosity led to the creation of the film’s character Emily, voiced by actress Fionnula Flanagan, who drifts back through her memories and transitions between the past and the present.

“Obviously I saw them as my lovely sweet grannies who would slip me biscuits and all these kind of things, but they had lived full lives before they became grandparents — before they even became parents — so I think I became more curious about what was it like for them, growing up in the time that they did,” Louise tells Feelgood.

“I knew that one of my grandmothers, for instance, had worked as a civil servant and when she got married she had to give up her job and I think: ‘Wow, that’s not so far away from where I’m at, in terms of time – such a different life.’. And I would love to have been able to talk to them more about the realities of being a woman when they grew up and how did they feel.

"As a child, you don’t really understand those things or see that other side of it.”

She suspects that older people can sometimes be seen on a surface level — labelled and categorised without further exploration:

“But of course, you don’t know the life they have lived unless you ask them or engage with them and sometimes you find out the most amazing stories, or sometimes it’s a very engaging perspective on the past and it’s just that its hidden behind this layer of ‘oh they’re older, so their life must have been like this…’ ”

Although none of Louise’s grandparents (who are all now dead) had suffered from dementia, the theme of memory loss is a universal one, she agrees.

She hopes herself to become “an old woman — and live a long life” but she also knows that ageing and memory loss are very real issues that younger people need to face among their older relatives, family and friends.

“In my film, I think Emily is a character who has lived an interesting and complicated but also fulfilling life, so she has an advantage to be able to engage in a part of her life that she hasn’t connected with for a while,” she says.

There is a playfulness to her trips back in time; her memories giving her a freedom that allows her to really reconnect directly with that part of her life that’s not there anymore.

But Louise says she didn’t want to sugar-coat the experience either.

Memory loss and issues around it are very difficult — very tough, but I was trying to put myself in the mind of someone who may be suffering from it because I think looking at it from the outside, it is very difficult.

Sometimes you can see how activities such as playing music can transform the expression on the face of people with dementia— they might sing along or dance “and wow, there is something still about their human spirit still in there that still wants to enjoy — and has the memory somewhere — of the good times that they had, or whatever it is,” she says.

As water features prominently in the film, Louise’s own memories of shared seaside trips with both her paternal gran from Dublin and her maternal gran from Tipperary interlock beautifully with her character Emily’s and with the ebb and flow of time.

Louise is building up an interesting bank of memories in her own life, as the exciting trip to the Oscars looms. Joining her will be Late Afternoon’s producer Nuria González Blanco.

They are both the official nominees and work at the Cartoon Saloon studio in Kilkenny, which already has a previous Academy Award nomination under its belt for The Secret of Kells.

How is she doing, now the date is so close?

“It’s a bit overwhelming — how do you prepare for something like that? I’m lucky to work in a studio where not only have they been nominated before, and know how to go about everything, but also the for the amount of support — everybody here is so delighted.’”

She pays tribute to the big collaborative effort involved in making the short.

“I wrote it, but a lot of people come in and they add extra meaning and extra visual emphasis, so the whole team here is one of the reasons we got to the Oscars.”

The film was made also possible through the Frameworks scheme funded by Screen Ireland and RTÉ, but is currently unavailable online due to Oscar policy restrictions.