Niamh McKeown’s Good Girls wins gold at Belfast Film Festival’s 18th Short Film Competition.
The highly anticipated Short Film Competition kicked off on Saturday morning with judges Chris Martin (Indie Movies), Sarah Edge (Professor of Photography and Cultural Studies at UU), Joan Parsons (Head of QFT), Eoin Cleland (last year’s winner, Incoming Call) and Sarah Jones (Co- Director Black Box) settling in to watch 33 short films from across the island of Ireland.
At the Filmmaker’s Ball, where the competition winner was announced and the filmmakers had an opportunity to network (and drink Birra Moretti), Sarah Edge commented that this year’s standard was the highest it had ever been. Amongst films detailing Kubrick’s British army invasion of Ireland, tales of supercool ways of coping with ‘casual’ rejection, a mission to find some lost hash and ash clouds and black oozing monstrosities was Good Girls, the film that picked up this years prize!
Good Girls, written and directed by Niamh McKeown and produced by Jack Cowhig, is about Pinkman’s finest student and head girl, Bonnie, who takes us on a tour of her school as she tries to round up the school captains in time for the school photo.
Made by students at Edinburgh Napier University as their final year project, the film has been praised for its visual style, cinematography, set design and direction, with the judges commenting that it was like “St Trinian’s meets Wes Anderson”.
The judges also said that they were smiling throughout the film and each scene was perfectly executed.
Congratulations to Niamh and her entire team!