We spoke to the director of 'Herself', Phyllida Lloyd, ahead of the movie's release this weekend. The feature was released on Amazon Prime in the US earlier this year and has already been met with rave reviews.
'Herself' depicts a single mother, Sandra (Clare Dunne), who's struggling to find a home for her two young daughters after leaving their abusive father.
Let down by the social housing system, she sets about building a house herself, and rallies a community of friends and volunteers to help her.
Phyllida Lloyd describes to us the origins of the screenplay, which Clare Dunne wrote as well as headlining the cast.
Lloyd explains: "A friend of hers ran from an abusive relationship and ended up having to declare herself homeless because there was no social housing for her and her children.
"Out of sheer outrage, Clare started writing, and she also started researching self-build, thinking ‘what if my friend were just able to build her own home, would that be possible?’
"Clare then met Dominic Stevens and our house is a model of the house he made in Leitrim for €25k.
"So the script was born out of fury and hope that there might be some obvious solutions there that just weren’t being considered."
The director - whose past works include 'Mamma Mia!' and 'The Iron Lady' - also spoke about how 'Herself' feels both authentic in its Irishness, but also has global appeal.
She says: "I felt that Clare was the one who was going to make sure it was authentic. My job was to make it feel like it was a world story.
"I knew that sometimes Irish films without stars can struggle to fly across the ponds to the west and east, and somehow I thought well, this isn’t just a Dublin story. This is happening in London, it’s happening everywhere.
"And so my role was to maybe see the world that was in Dublin, and that’s how we came to wanting to have a diverse group of people on the building site. That’s what I saw when I came to Dublin. You hear Russian and Brazilian accents and speakers. It seemed to be as cosmopolitan as London, really. So in that way my outsider-ness was helpful."
She adds: "It was an incredible privilege to make it in Ireland. The process was really efficient and it was a world class craft.
"I was really lucky with a fantastic director of photography in Tom Comerford. He managed to help me give it beauty which might have been lost in the scramble to just get it on the screen."
'Herself' is showing in Irish cinemas from Friday, 10 October.
