Christy director Brendan Canty: "“It was about what stage do kids like that become teenagers and lose all their confidence"

When Brendan Canty started making short experimental videos in his student days in Cork, he could not have guessed that his debut feature would one day take home the Grand Prix of the International Jury at the Berlinale.

Christy, a scrappy, heartfelt drama based in a tight knit community in Cork, has already marked him out as one of Ireland’s most interesting new directors. It boasts a cast that blends rising Irish acting talent such as Alison Oliver, Chris Walley, Emma Willis and Diarmuid Noyes, alongside locals from the city’s Kabin Crew rap collective, known for their hit single ‘The Spark.’

At its heart is a magnetic performance from Danny Power, a young Cork actor Canty discovered for the 2019 short that first introduced Christy to audiences.

The film opens with Christy, not yet 18 and already battered by years of foster care. He’s sent to live with his half-brother Shane, played by Noyes, who is building a tentative stability with his partner Stacey in suburban Cork. Their uneasy household becomes the testing ground for Christy’s future, caught between the pull of delinquency and the fragile promise of belonging. The story leans into the rough and ready charm and humour of the locals, without looking away from the realities of social exclusion, drug use and a care system stretched beyond its limits.

“We never wanted it to be an issues film,” Canty says, “we just wanted it to feel authentic, to show the good and the bad, and to let people decide for themselves.”

Canty’s roots are in music videos. Hozier’s Take Me to Church went viral and launched him onto a bigger stage, but his way into cinema was less about cinephilia than a knack for getting people excited about creating something together.

“My mum always said my biggest skill was bringing people together,” he reflects, “and filmmaking is the ultimate version of that.”
He had already been experimenting with online videos when the opportunity arose to direct Hozier’s hit.

“That one blew up,” he remembers, “but what was really important for me is that it was a narrative music video, it was storytelling, it was basically like making a short film.”

He credits that with shifting his focus away from purely visual experimentation and towards character and plot.

“Without really thinking about it, that was my first short. It got me in the mood to do more, to think about how story can hit emotionally, and it made me want to try my hand at longer form.”

It was this instinct that drew him to the teenagers he met one Bonfire Night in Knocknaheeny. He encountered kids full of wit and charm, but who were already resigned to futures without much opportunity. He remembers standing at the fire with his camera when one boy asked what he was doing. Canty told him he was a filmmaker.

“I remember one of them specifically being like, I’d love to do something like that,” Canty recalls. “And I was like, why don’t you? College is free, you can get a camera. I was so naïve. And he just said, ‘Nah, you don’t get it.’ He said, a life of crime for me. It broke my heart.”

Another boy thanked him just for talking to him.

“He said nobody ever talks to him. That just floored me. And I thought, these kids are so cheeky and smart and charming, they’re literally building bonfires out of nothing, and yet they can’t see any future for themselves. That was the spark.”

That awareness turned into the seed of Christy, first as a short film and then, when he and co-writer Alan O’Gorman realised how much potential their young cast carried, as a feature.

“We always wanted to write a film set in Cork, around the young lads we grew up with, but that night gave me the story,” Canty says. “It was about what stage do kids like that become teenagers and lose all their confidence. And the answer, for me, was community. With the right people around you, you can find a way out.”

What makes the film sing is its refusal to flatten these lives into bleakness. The children of Kabin Studio bring a natural irreverence that undercuts the darker notes.

“When we made the short, we had written a more serious script, but the kids weren’t like that,” he says. “Even though they had been through trauma, they were joyous and funny and charming. We scrapped our tone and leaned into the one right in front of us.”

The Kabin itself became a kind of lodestar.

“I really wanted to bottle the tone of that place,” Canty explains. “I’ve never experienced anywhere like it. It is a sanctuary, a safe space, and when you walk in there’s just this nurturing vibe. The younger kids grow up to become the tutors and the inspiration for the next ones. I thought, if I can expand the feeling of this place into the world of the film, that’s the heart of it.”

Authenticity was another touchstone, especially in portraying foster care. Canty and O’Gorman drew on the expertise of O’Gorman’s social worker mother, as well as the experiences of young people they worked with at Kabin, some of whom had grown up in care themselves.

“There was nothing we put in the script that wasn’t run past people who knew,” he says. “If a foster kid can watch it and feel represented, then everyone else can believe it too.”

He is proud that small details resonate with those who know the system.

“We’ve had so many comments about Christy coming out of the foster home with his belongings in a black bin bag, about how dehumanising that is. That came straight from real stories. And the social worker in the film, he is trying his best, but he’s overloaded, 40 cases at once, constantly on the phone. Social workers who’ve seen it told me, that’s exactly what it’s like.”

The story also looks at how two brothers can have different memories of and reactions to their childhood. Shane, the older brother, remembers everything but tries to bury these memories in silence. Christy doesn’t remember anything – but feels the grief and fear and loss of innocence very deeply.

If Shane struggles to speak about what haunts him and Christy barely speaks at all, the film makes space for women to hold things together. Stacey, pragmatic and patient, becomes the quiet ballast of the home, while Pauline, a middle-aged hairdresser played with tenderness by Helen Behan, offers Christy both work and dignity.

“It is a story about two young men,” Canty acknowledges, “but the women are the emotional intelligence of the film. Stacey, Pauline, Leona, they’re the ones trying to hold things together or give the lads the space to figure it out. We didn’t want them to be devices, we wanted them to be real.”

At its Berlin premiere, Canty was amused to hear international audiences latch onto Cork’s specificity.

“The Brits loved that it was from Cork,” he laughs. “They thought there was an exotic flavour to it. We talked about whether we should soften the accent, but we leaned into it. I love when you watch something like The Wire and you don’t catch every word, but you still get it, you get immersed in that world. Cork is weird and wonderful, why wouldn’t we show that?”

It was a gamble that paid off. International audiences have loved the specificity of location but the universal themes of the film, while word of mouth has carried home too, with packed screenings in Cork and audiences from nuns to teenagers claiming it as their own.

For Canty, the success is both thrilling and grounding. He is already at work developing a television project around some of the film’s side characters, including young charmer Robot and Leona, but he is wary of rushing into another feature without the right spark. “You have to come across something magical, like the Kabin Crew,” he says, “otherwise it is not worth giving years of your life to. I don’t want to make a film just for the sake of it. I want to wait until I find another story that has that magic.”

In Christy, he has found that magic, distilling the vitality of a city and a generation too often written off, and giving it a cinematic language all its own.

• Christy is in cinemas now.