THE QUIET WOMAN : Document Films

THE QUIET WOMAN

An old woman makes the long journey alone to Connemara with her husbands ashes and mends her relationship with his past and her future.

-Irene Hall has often been called, the quiet woman. A simple living, stoic seventy-year old Dublin mother, wife and now, widow. The film opens with her caring for Tom Hall her older husband who has had Alzheimer’s disease for ten years. We get a glimpse into their lives over the course of one day and night. The following morning Tom, has a fall and a subsequent fatal cardiac arrest. Irene calls her daughter and son home to bury their father.

Mary comes from London, with her difficult teenage daughter Iseult and James, a husband she tolerates. Mary has been keeping a secret from them all. Seamus comes from Sydney, without his husband Theo and in the throes of an adoption his mother knows nothing about. This is a family in crisis yet they don’t know it.

Irene has a wish to scatter Tom’s ashes over the quiet man bridge much to the surprise of her children who vehemently disagree – there is a family plot in Deansgrange after all – and they never really fully bought into their dads’ fable about him being John Wayne’s personal barber.

Irene awakes at dawn, sneaks from her own home and travels to Cong, in Co. Galway alone. Along the way she meet three strangers who touch her life in a way she never imagined possible. They open her eyes to all she still has to offer. Yes, even at 70 years of age!

When Iseult gets a snapchat of her boyfriend Rupert snogging her best friend she has a huge argument with her mother, and all the secrets come out. Iseult runs away – she knows exactly where her grandmother has gone and will stop at nothing to get to her.

These three days together bring them all back, in a place none of them really believed in, Cong, where once upon a time in 1951 Tom Hall was a personal barber to John Wayne on the set of The Quiet Man.