Aisling Byrne

So Mary is Missing is a short film.

We're very proud to say it's now an Oscar qualifying short film after winning the Grand Prix down in Cork back in November.

But the roots of the film went back many years prior.

Derek and our other actors at Run of the Mill worked together every Friday at Maynooth University.

and we tend to make projects that are led by the artists' ideas, brilliant ideas, and by their talents.

We had made many theatre productions.

We had done a small foray into short film a few years ago, and we decided that we wanted to do something quite ambitious.

So we ran a writer's room back in 2023 for 13 of our actors with intellectual disabilities, and the seed idea was

imagining that a key worker called Mary from a day service, from an Irish disability day service provider, had gone missing.

But her fate and what had become of her was left entirely in the hands of our actors.

So we improvised.

We ran writers' workshops with Katrina Daly.

We brought some outside actors in.

And from that, we cobbled together the idea for this short film, which had to be scripted then after the writers' workshops.

This was a stage production in Project Arts Centre last year where Derek played the lead.

Yeah, very much so.

And I think what Derek is really highlighting so brilliantly there is the sort of the nuances between stage performance and screen performance.

And

Mary's Missing was Derek's first short film and it was the first step into screen acting for a lot of our artists at Run of the Mill.

And so we ran a sort of a 12 week program called Ready to Roll beforehand in collaboration with the National Talent Academy for Film and Television, because I suppose as a filmmaker and...