Search The Archive

Search the film archive

Homelessness takes centre stage in this heartbreaking and urgent portrait of one working-class family’s increasingly desperate search for sanctuary amid Ireland’s housing crisis.

After a decision by their landlord to sell the home they rent, Rosie, her husband John Paul and their four children are suddenly without a fixed address. John Paul takes extra shifts at his restaurant dishwashing job, while Rosie searches for the impossible – an affordable home to rent in a brutally expensive market – as the family spends more time cramped together in their small car.

Paddy Breathnach sticks close to Rosie to make a wider comment on an oppressive, broken social system. Booker Prize-winning author and playwright Roddy Doyle’s (The Commitments) compassionate screenplay reduces the drama to a 36-hour period that emphasises mounting pressure and constricting space. Mining a similar vein of fury as Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, this Dublin Film Critics Circle award-winning film is timely, necessary viewing – a reminder of how easily any of us could be plunged into an impossible situation just like this.

“Roddy Doyle has written a very moving and insightful film about homelessness … The potency of the film lies in showing us that the ‘homeless’ are not a caste or tribe whose condition has been ordained at birth, and their situation is not a cosmic punishment for laziness – they are people like everyone else whose situation has been created by economic forces.” – The Guardian