Aisha

Ireland, 2022

Director: Frank Berry; screenplay: Frank Berry; cinematography: Tom Comerford; production design: Tamara Conboy; costumes: Kathy Strachan; editing: Colin Campbell; music: Daragh O’Toole; casting: Elaine Grainger; producers: Tristan Orpen Lynch, Aoife O’Sullivan, Donna Eperon, Sam Bisbee; production companies: Subotica Films, Write Direction Films. Irish location: Dublin, County Wicklow

Running time: 94’

With Letitia Wright, Josh O’Connor, Denis Conway, Stuart Graham, Ruth McCabe, Lorcan Cranitch

SYNOPSIS

Aisha, a young Nigerian woman seeking asylum in Ireland, is floundering in a maze of social services and bureaucracy. Alone and unwilling to sacrifice her dignity to satisfy the demands of the authorities, she finds an ally in Conor, an employee at her residence home, a local young man with a troubled past of his own. Together they struggle to maintain their tender friendship in the face of Aisha’s increasingly dire predicament and her rapidly diminishing options.

DIRECTOR

Frank Berry’s route to award-winning and critically acclaimed feature films came via ten years of community filmmaking and teaching. This work led to the feature documentary Ballymun Lullaby (2011) which won the Directors Guild of America’s ‘Directors Finders Award’, and chartered Berry on a journey of directing socially engaged feature films. His first two feature film dramas I Used to Live Here and Michael Inside – both presented at IRISHFILMFESTA, in 2016 and 2019 respectively – have won awards and critical acclaim both at home and internationally, including the award for ‘Best Film’ at 2018 Irish Film and Television Awards for Michael Inside.

TRAILER