When her troubled mother goes missing, Irish filmmaker Myrid Carten returns home to find her, but risks losing herself.
Artist and debut filmmaker Myrid Carten has been filming since she was a child. Her mother Nuala, once a successful social worker, suffered a mental breakdown after the sudden death of her own mother. She shuffles between rehab clinics, psychiatric hospitals, and occasionally the street.
When Nuala goes missing somewhere in Ireland, Myrid returns from London to find her and picks up her camera again in response to this new crisis. Atmospheric Irish ballads about vagrant drinkers and dreamlike images of the neglected family home conjure the cultural and relational roots at play. In fresh and inventive ways, the film returns to a familiar, universal question: how can we be with those we love without losing ourselves?
Her search takes her into a feuding family, a contested house. Intimate, surprising, and often darkly funny conversations with her mother and other family members reveal the trials of loving someone who struggles with addiction and madness. Home videos from Myrid’s childhood and recordings of video installations from her current work as an artist form a playful blend of fictional and documentary elements, which compellingly capture the vicious cycle of care and rage.
A Want In Her is an immersive, first person account of the cost of love, and how difficult it can be to escape.
"Raw, searing ... a daughter’s shattering testament to her mother’s absence, presence and endurance ... passages of cathartic beauty, grace and even humor." Variety
"A profound reprocessing of personal archives and piercing conversations ... clearly impresses as a debut and could become essential viewing for anyone grappling with the indescribable complexities within a mother-daughter relationship." Cineuropa
Myrid Carten
Myrid Carten is an Irish filmmaker who makes works for cinemas and galleries. She trained in Artists’ Film at Goldsmiths University London and Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, UAL. Her work interrogates both the struggle for intimacy and the ways we are compromised by our pasts. She received the Arts Council of Ireland’s Next Generation Artist Award 2018. Her films have screened internationally and been supported by the BFI, Doc Society, Screen Ireland, NI Screen, New Dawn Fund, and the Netherlands Film Fund.
A Want in Her is her debut feature.