With the referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment to the Irish constitution taking place a number of filmmakers attempted to capture the zeitgeist on film.,
One of the most intriguing of these was Elliot Milofsky and Matthew Roche's Philomena, which turned an unwanted pregnancy into the story of an unwanted intruder who is not allowed leave a woman's home.
CinÉireann spoke with the directors about their short.
Philomela is certainly a different take on the crisis pregnancy issue.
Matthew Roche: We tried to make it a bit different from what had been put out in the past.
Elliot Milofsky: There's some really good shorts out about Repeal, but they are all very straight-forward stories. These awful stories about what women have gone through with their pregnancies.
Matthew: Those definitely do have a place. Since it was so close to the referendum it almost feels like discourse was closed. It's such a contentious issue that people had bunkered down on both sides and you had a scattering of undecided voters in the middle. And I'm even guilty of scrolling through Facebook and seeing something from the other side and just skipping past it. And I'm guessing that happened on the No side too. So the idea with this was to basically Trojan horse the issue, to make it look like it didn't have anything to do with repeal. It didn't work out really that way. We wanted somebody to watch it without bias, and then they see the 'Vote Yes' at the end and think about how do all the emotions that I felt about her distress line up with my views on this matter. Right now, how it stands, I think it is getting across the emotions that we wanted.
Elliot: We were marketing it as a referendum short film rather than just for Repeal so that we could get as many watches as we could without bias. But so far most people who are sharing it are our friends and people that we know, who are mostly pro-choice people so we haven't really reached that many pro-life people.
Matthew: It feels like we are stuck in an echo-chamber at the moment. Everyone is like "Wow this is great because it lines up with everything that I think!". Even before we published it I tried to think of every way that it could be attacked and I wrote a massive essay on it to refer people to, but it hasn't had to be used yet.
The premise has the intruder not being allowed to leave despite her wanting him gone. Maybe that's a little different to how people view a crisis pregnancy...
Matthew: Our main thing when we writing it...And we had to rewrite it a lot of times because of the nature of the whole thing...
Elliot: We didn't want the intruder to be a bad guy. The intruder does represent the fetus. And the fetus is never trying to cause any harm to the woman.
Matthew: It's indirect.
Filming the 8th: Elliot Milofsky and Matthew Roche take an unusual approach with Philomela
Words: Niall Murphy
50 CinÉireann / May 2018