Gabija Gataveckaite
A DUN LAOGHAIRE actress who produced, directed and starred in her own film is “delighted” that it will be screened at a prestigious Berlin film festival.
Maureen O’Connell’s feature film ‘Spa Weekend’ will appear at the Female Filmmakers Festival in Berlin in June.
“I’m delighted that it has made it to a film festival, it’s such a relief, as all the work has paid off,” Maureen said. “We’re also waiting to hear back from some Dublin film festivals that we’ve applied to.”
In the film, Maureen plays the leading role of Jo Murphy, an actress who moves back home to Dublin from London and reunites with her old friend Stoney (Steven Neeson), who is also an actor.
While the pair are at a standstill in their careers, they both try and convince each other that they’re doing great.
Adventures kick off once Stoney gets into trouble with his landlord and Jo knocks on his door and asks if he is interested in going for a spa weekend, in a trick to make him go camping with her.
This results in a series of misadventures as the pair make their way down to the country.
“It was great fun to shoot it, we shot it over a year,” Maureen revealed. “We had no budget and no money, so whenever I had €100, which is how much it would cost to shoot for a day and cover expenses, I would call the crew.”
O’Connell has been acting for over 10 years and started producing her own films around four years ago.
“I like producing because it gives me the freedom to write,” she said. “While we were making the film, I had to be very organised and keep track of everything.”
Being organised included keeping track of the smallest details, from scripts to each small prop on a scene to ensure continuity.
“We had three hours to shoot a scene and we had to piece it all together afterwards. I had to keep track of all of the props in the scene if we had to come back to it the next day – there’s a scene with sausages which I had to cook in the morning and by the time we ate them, they were cold,” she laughed.
She noted that as the films are made with little to no money, being nominated for an award at a film festival makes all the hard work worth it.
“Getting into a film festival is almost like justification,” she added.
While the actress is currently relying on a café job to pay the bills, her acting career is reaching new heights with the release of ‘Spa Weekend’.
“I would love to do filmmaking full time, that’s why we’re all working so hard, and to get paid for it would be awesome.”
However, she likes to keep a good mix of acting and filmmaking.
“Acting is just turning up and getting paid,” she said. “Filmmaking is more of a voice – sometimes, female actresses have to portray an image at the expense of a male writer who thinks that that’s how women should be.
“There’s been more of an awakening for the female voice now and society has changed.”
