{"id":19041,"date":"2025-11-17T15:22:04","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T14:22:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ceeanimation.eu\/?post_type=news&p=19041"},"modified":"2025-12-02T15:17:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T14:17:19","slug":"ceea-talks-giovanna-ferrari-about-eiru-we-shouldnt-waste-it-on-things-that-do-not-matter","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/ceeanimation.eu\/news\/ceea-talks-giovanna-ferrari-about-eiru-we-shouldnt-waste-it-on-things-that-do-not-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"CEEA Talks: Giovanna Ferrari about \u00c9IRU: \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t waste it on things that do not matter\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\u00c9IRU, by Giovanna Ferrari, takes you to the mythical landscape of Iron Age Ireland. Powerful clans, locked in conflict, provide an ideal setting for an animated short film in fiery colours, set against a foreboding darkness. And let\u2019s be honest\u2026 You don\u2019t see a muscleman walking around with an anvil on his head every day!<\/strong><\/p>\n

One day, the village well runs dry, and an important task is entrusted to the young girl \u00c9iru. When she descends into the empty well, the villagers place their fate in her hands. But what she discovers at the bottom has far-reaching consequences for the entire community.<\/p>\n

Ferrari, making her directorial debut with \u00c9IRU, builds on her experience as a storyboard artist. Since 2014, she has worked at the Irish Cartoon Saloon Studio as Head of Story. The personal voice she brings to \u00c9IRU fits seamlessly – both visually and thematically – within the Cartoon Saloon tradition: poetic tales about strong young girls, set against a backdrop of mythology and folklore. She spoke about this as a lecturer at CEE’s Animation Workshop in \u0141\u00f3d\u017a.<\/p>\n

Giovanna Ferrari: Not long before I started to write \u00c9IRU, Russia had invaded Ukraine. There was this feeling of being in a moment when history\u2019s pendulum was on the cusp of swinging back from a world of cooperation to a world of domination and violence. In all of Europe, we started to identify ourselves again through hating \u2018the other\u2019. First, we define the others, then put them in a box, and hate them. In all this commotion, we completely forgot about mankind\u2019s most urgent problem\u2026 Climate change doesn\u2019t make a distinction between you and the other; we\u2019re all in for it, but we\u2019re too busy hating the others to fix the real problem. This prompted me to make this movie, giving a way to think collectively about positive things we could do to make a small change. When I started working on \u00c9IRU, I hoped that the movie would have become obsolete by the time it was done. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen; conflicts around the globe have expanded, and climate change is still just an afterthought for many administrations.<\/p>\n

If you were to ask people in the cinema what the main topic of \u00c9IRU is, I would be surprised if the majority of them answered \u2018climate change\u2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ferrari: Because you cannot view ecology separately from the exploitation of minorities, sexism, discrimination, or respect for the Earth. You cannot define one without the other; they\u2019re all intertwined.<\/p>\n

The story takes us back to the heyday of the clans. Do Anglo-Saxon people still identify themselves with that image of the mighty warriors they once were?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ferrari: They probably don\u2019t identify themselves with the image of a bearded guy, wearing an anvil on his head, but they do strongly identify themselves as Irish. There is a deep sense of belonging to the land, which I find beautiful, but that can easily be exploited to associate discontent, housing crisis, and economic struggle with the idea of “the other”, rather than reflecting on our own responsibilities and achievable solutions.<\/p>\n

Everybody watching \u00c9IRU has the same question: What’s at the bottom of the pit?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ferrari: \u00c9iru\u2019s descent into the bowels of the earth is not just a narrative journey; it\u2019s also imaginative. At the bottom of the pit, she finds a connective tissue between the land and the people, between humanity and nature, between the past and the present. There is the spirit of nature, which is a feminine, nurturing spirit, like the ancient goddess Bridget. Going down the well was very much a way of bringing that goddess to life.<\/p>\n

Who is this Bridget?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ferrari: A goddess that has survived for many centuries. She was so hugely important in Irish mythology that Christianity couldn’t erase her and made a saint of her, Saint Brigid of Kildare. Even nowadays, people believe in Bridget more than they believe in anything else. She is the goddess of fire, water, healing, and poetry, but also of forge and war. Bridget is omnipresent, in the water in \u2018healing wells\u2019, in the forces of nature, in the trees where people hang pieces of cloth to beg for healing. There’s a lot of that in the movie, although it might not appear clearly to anyone who’s not Irish. Bridget is also a goddess of justice towards minorities and the oppressed. That is why she encourages \u00c9iru to listen to the stories, to the voices from the past, coming from victims of violence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Eiru trailer:\u00a0https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0J3KfMlYRKk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Because violence in Ireland has hit particularly hard?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ferrari: In Ireland, recently, there has been a huge reckoning going on about all the things that have been done to women and children, all the systematic violence and abuse practiced by the church and the state. This reckoning helped Ireland to make a giant leap forward in terms of civil rights. Many progressive laws were implemented because of this. It wasn\u2019t a walk in the park; it shattered lives and families, when people finally started talking about abuses, or about being taken away to the Magdalene Laundries with their babies. But you can\u2019t look forward if you don’t first confront your past.<\/p>\n

You witnessed this as an Italian coming to live in Ireland.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ferrari: Today, I am a naturalized Irish citizen, as well as Italian. I don’t feel 100 per cent Italian, I don\u2019t feel 100 per cent Irish, but since I first set foot on Irish soil, I’ve found a lot of kinship with the Irish. Italians and Irish people have much in common, like a certain sense of rhythm to life, a love for the landscape, a profound sense of belonging to the earth, and a similar perception of motherhood; Italian and Irish mothers are very similar characters. And there\u2019s the music! I grew up surrounded by people singing and playing music in bars, and I found a similar spontaneous, sensorial attachment to music in Dublin. Both in Ireland and Italy, people just sing for the love of it.<\/p>\n

You went there to work for Cartoon Saloon? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Ferrari: I am proud to have been part of the studio for ten years, and even before that, I was already working with them; the first time was on SONG OF THE SEA.<\/p>\n

Cartoon Saloon has a clear visual and thematic identity. How did it feel to stick to that line in your own project, \u00c9IRU?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ferrari: The studio\u2019s entity is created by the people who are working there. The artists who worked on WOLFWALKERS and THE BREADWINNER are all moving in a certain direction. And this style came out exactly like I wanted it to be for \u00c9IRU. The folklore, the ecological concern, putting Bridget into the mix,… Such things are very Cartoon Saloonish. All the way throughout the genesis of the movie, I genuinely wanted to make a Cartoon Saloon film! I can\u2019t imagine myself wandering too far away from that style, because that\u2019s the direction I tend to go in myself.<\/p>\n

Thematically or visually?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ferrari: You can call it a philosophy. The less you have to think about, the better you can do the things you\u2019re doing. I have a passion for simplifying things as much as possible; I don’t think there’s anything that can be too simple. Like many artists, I like constraints. It’s comfortable to know that there are certain limits; without constraints, I can\u2019t create. And another thing that I share with the team is the idea that getting the opportunity to make a film is so rare and amazing that we shouldn\u2019t waste it on things that do not matter. Especially not in times when there are so many important things to do and say.<\/p>\n

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