Irene, a 10-minute short by Glasgow-based filmmaker Lindsay Goodall, won a key prize at a US film festival and now qualifies for the Academy Awards.
The film, about Ms Goodall’s grandmother Irene Lowes, who died in February aged 92, has also won the jury prize for the ongoing Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival.
The road to an Oscar nomination for a short film involving winning awards at certain respected film festivals, one of which is the Palm Springs International ShortFest in Florida, in which Irene won the first prize for a short documentary.
Ms Goodall, 30, made the film as a study and remembrance of the final months of her grandmother’s life as Alzheimer’s affected her memory, and the care she received from her daughter, Ms Goodall’s mother, Roberta, in her home town of Glenrothes in Fife.
It shows the three generations of women in the family dealing with Irene’s infirmity, and was produced by Glasgow’s Blindside productions and La Belle Allee Productions, for the Scottish Documentary Institute’s Bridging the Gap scheme.
“It would be amazing to be in the running for an Oscar, it is great even to be in the position where I am allowed to submit my film to the academy,” Ms Goodall said.
“Short films are not like feature films, there are strict rules about how you can be eligible for the Academy Awards, and winning the prize in Palm Springs has now put us in that position. I did not even manage to get to Palm Springs because it was so expensive to go.
“Since then we have had a lot of attention for the film, which we showed for the first time at the Edinburgh film festival last year.”
Watching the film is still an emotional experience for Ms Goodall.
“I watched Irene last week at one of the mental health festival screenings, and I got quite upset at the part where my Gran is getting into the car to go to the nursing home and she’s saying, in the voiceover, that she doesn’t want to go into a home as she’s quite happy where she is,” she said.
“It just sort of struck me that not long after that she wouldn’t have been able to construct a sentence at all or put her point of view across, and that really upset me just thinking about how frustrating that must have been for her, and how difficult it was at the time knowing we were losing her.”
Filming began in 2007, but after being formally commissioned in 2008, Ms Goodall filmed from January of that year until May.
“It was quite difficult, facing up to the fact that my gran had Alzheimer’s,” she said.
“But making the film, I think I saw her more than I would have done otherwise – making the journey from Glasgow to Fife – and I think that was a good part of the filming process.”
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