Animation inspired by mother's poem to her daughters ready for Galway premiere

South Wales Guardian

25-06-2025

Ciara Tinney, 39, a former assistant director on hit fantasy drama Game Of Thrones, said it does not feel real that the film Wildkind will be shown at the festival.
The mother-of-three began writing her poem Wildkind after giving birth to her first daughter Adabelle, 11, and began to illustrate it when her daughters Fiadh Ros, eight, and Birdie Blue, six, were born.
The book is an ode to the landscape and nature of her homeland.
'Motherhood naturally became a really creative time, because you just had these huge thoughts,' she told the PA news agency.
'So I just started to write them.
'The book is a poem written for my daughters, and it is, very basically, just a story of how I want them to live, and how I want to live with them, focusing on being kind and staying connected to the wild.
'Kids today are being labelled as digital natives.
'The idea that they're spending half of their time in a digital landscape is just crazy, especially for someone who grew up in Fermanagh and used to just run about the fields.'
Tinney self-published Wilkdkind and sold around 300 copies, before embarking on transforming the book into an animation, voiced by her mother.
She added: 'A lot of the kids books and things that were around when Ada was tiny, it's very rainbow coloured and very high stimulation artwork and crazy animals, like tigers.
'But we just didn't have that here. So I kind of thought it'd be lovely to have a more realistic and view on what our wild is.
'It's not going to be a rainforest jungle, but there's still so much to explore here in Ireland.
'It's just this little grounding, the fluid wilderness, and the watercolour imagery, it's supposed to feel like it's slowing you down.'
She said the black-and-white theme of the book was about simplicity, but also about connection.
Tinney is hoping that the film, which is available in English, Irish and Arabic, will resonate with a wide audience.
'The overall idea that I really wanted to come across in the book was of 'one land and one sea', and it's here for sharing, a kind of a universal landscape that could be shared by everybody.
'There was a gorgeous conversation I had with some of the people who did the voiceover in Arabic.
'We were looking at the book one day, and I said 'Does anywhere here make you think of home?'
'Two of the mums, Rasha and Arwa who are from Sudan, started telling the story about the River Nile.
'The idea of the river was making them think of the River Nile, and being under this mountain where the river flows by and there's a woman selling fish freshly caught out of the river.
'And it was just amazing, it's just a class little moment to think, if that can make them feel at home with this imagery, then I feel a real sense of accomplishment in that.'
The film will be shown as part of the Galway Film Fleadh on Sunday July 13 at 12:30pm in Town Hall Theatre.
'I'm just so proud of the film, getting to work with the Arabic speaking families in that way was just amazing, because that's a whole part of the story.
'It's about integration too, and it's about art for all and everybody being able to be a part of this artistic piece of work and that exploration of mother tongue.
'The overall story of the book I always say is a call to come home, it's a mother's call to come home, to come home to Mother Earth.
'I just think it's a nice message, especially in today's world.'
Wildkind is directed by John McDaid, animated by the creative studio Dog Ears, and received funding from Northern Ireland Screen.