Aisling in the frame for future success

PORTUMNA documentary producer Aisling Ahmed has scooped the best short documentary award, in association with Teach Solas, at the Galway Film Fleadh for The End of the Counter.

The documentary tells the story of the first self-service supermarkets coming to Ireland and what the end of the old over-the-counter shops meant to the communities they served. Produced by Aisling, it was directed by Newbridge native Laura McGann.

Aisling said the announcement came as a surprise. “We’ve had two screenings of this short, one in Cork last November and one in Dublin and we have been on the go for a little while, so we were very surprised. We weren’t expecting it at all. It was great and just being from Galway, I had a lot of friends and family there with me so it was quite special,” she said.

The short documentary was one of nine entered into this category at the Galway Film Fleadh. Although they haven’t received any direct feedback from the judging panel as yet, Aisling said the short draws a great audience reaction.

“It gets a great laugh, there is humour in the way Laura draws out the characters and it leaves people thinking about things because it is a bit tied up with what we’ve lost and what has been coming back with the crash. There were some great films in there but with some heavy topics and I think people like a bit of nostalgia,” she said.

The 13-minute documentary has been in production since 2009 and was made possible through Irish Film Board funding. Aisling and Laura went all over the country to find participants with connections to the local corner shops and supermarket chains that took over.

The film features Portumna man John Dolan, now living in Limerick and Ennis sisters Francis O’Halloran and Helen McDonagh.
“It features different recollections of those working in a shop and we also give it from the customer’s point of view. We were looking for archive originally and those shops just weren’t photographed. People took them for granted and then they were gone. I had met Laura quite a few years ago and she had wonderful footage of her grandfather and we put in for funding from the Irish Film Board the year before but we didn’t get it. It was a case of try and try again. Laura did some more research and we decided to focus on the day the shop opened and the changeover between the day the big supermarket came to town and that seemed to be a great hook,” Aisling explained.

Aisling and Laura are really looking forward to the doors the award might open for them.
“Winning an award like that, it really opens up possibilities for the film. Galway is technically an Oscar qualifying festival. I’m not sure of the technicalities but I understand if you win at Galway, you can apply for the Oscars, it is very well recognised around the world. We’ve been entering it to festivals and being able to send it to festivals on the back of ‘we were the best short documentary in Galway’ means people will pay it a bit more attention. We are hoping that it will travel around over the next year and hopefully, eventually, we would love for it to go out on television in Ireland. We have to do the festival thing first,” she said.

Aisling had a second short film showing at the Galway Film Fleadh, which was competing with The End of the Counter, called Sparlo. It was filmed and directed by Corkman Keith O’Shea who lived and worked in Afghanistan for a number of years. It deals with the ancient game of Buzkashi, the national sport of Afghanistan.