Girl Power

Writer and director Marian Quinn just won the Best First Film award at the Galway Film Festival. 32A, a tender meditation on the nature of friendship, is set in Dublin in the summer of 1979, and it tells the coming of age story of one teenage Irish girl in the testing years that lie between childhood and the adult she will become. Quinn speaks with CAHIR O'DOHERTY.

WHEN Marian Quinn was seven her family moved back to Ireland from the U.S., and suddenly she had to learn to find her way in a country that was at once familiar and strange. Adolescents have to do something very similar every day. As an American in Ireland and an Irishwoman in America, Quinn knows what it's like to be an outsider and an insider at the same time. Perhaps that's why she writes about the transformative moments in teenager's lives with so much sensitivity and insight.

32A, Quinn's debut feature film named after the famous Dublin bus route (and the bra sizes of the girls in question) just won the Best First Film award at the Galway Arts Festival, where it was seen by a host of distribution companies that will bring it to the public here and in Ireland. It's an auspicious start for the director and the reward for all the long years of planning.

"I started writing this film when I was still living in New York," Quinn told the Irish Voice. "But then I moved to Ireland and established my own production company (Janey Pictures, based in Leitrim). Being an actor has helped me as a director because I know what my own actors are going through. Many directors don't realize how vulnerable an actor can feel, with all eyes on you to perform."

The decision to write a coming of age film that was told from a young girl's perspective first came to Quinn when she suddenly realized she couldn't think of enough examples of them to count on one hand.

"It's funny. I've had people say to me there's been too many coming of age movies already, and I reply that I don't know many that are taken from the girl's perspective. At the Galway Film Festival a lot of people came up to me - both women and men - and told me it was great to see a girl up on the screen and to see the film from her point of view. It was interesting to note that the people who suggested it was a played out genre were men."

Another famous and spirited Irish writer inspired Quinn as she developed the screenplay. "When I was a teenager I read Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy. And I remember deciding that it would be really interesting to follow her example and chronicle the experiences of women of my generation who grew up in the late 1970s and 1980s. I have stayed in contact with my old friends from school and we've all been through similar experiences - with relationships and so on - and so I decided to follow O'Brien's lead."

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Nster.com