1st November 2026
We are delighted to announce that filmmaker Deirdre Mulrooney from Ireland, has won Ó Bhéal’s 14th poetry-film competition with her film The Clouds are not Inaccessible, as announced at the Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Festival awards ceremony.
The Clouds are not Inaccessible was chosen from 186 submissions received from 164 filmmakers in 38 countries. The 2025 shortlist represents 19 countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, Poland, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, The Netherlands, the UK and the USA.
Poem: The Clouds are not Inaccessible
Synopsis – An unknown 1932 text by avant-garde artist Lucia Joyce plunges us into a phantasmagoric world of surreal creativity. Evanna Lynch as Lucia Joyce leads a delightful and sometimes frightening odyssey from Lucia’s own exquisite hand-crafted “lettrines”, to a shamanic dance which launches her soul into a magical dimension where she demonstrates to her detractors exactly how to reach the clouds…
Director: Deirdre Mulrooney (Ireland)
Author of Irish Moves, an illustrated history of dance and physical theatre in Ireland (The Liffey Press), and Orientalism, Orientation, and The Nomadic Work of Pina Bausch, Deirdre is committed to re-inscribing the body into Irish cultural history, Deirdre’s influential BAI-funded feature radio documentary, short dance film ‘Lucia Joyce: Full Capacity’, and her Joyce Studies Annual essay ‘Fail Better: Lucia Joyce and the Abbey Theatre Ballets’, change the accepted ‘mad girl’ narrative, and invite consideration of Lucia Joyce as a significant artist in her own right.
Her play ‘Brancusi Bird’, was supported by an Arts Council Agility Award and ‘Burn Bright. On Bloomsday 2025 Deirdre presented an illustrated talk entitled “Lucia Joyce in Paris” at Dublin’s Alliance Française, inspired by her 2024 residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais. Continuing this reclamation project, Deirdre’s new short aerial dance film “The Clouds are not Inaccessible”, based on an unknown surrealist text by Lucia Joyce premiered at Dublin’s Irish Film Institute on Bloomsday 2026 as part of Bloomsday Film Festival.
“I have shied away from dance in Poetry Films in the past but in this case the magical fusion of dance, narrative and artistic device drew me in immediately. The wonderful costumes and the subtle delicate words of Lucia Joyce and James Joyce, the crossing cultural threads from Yeats’s Theatre masks to the streetscape of Dublin fired my imagination. This was a film that took a lot of different people a lot of time to create and it shows in the final product.”
“’The Clouds are not Inaccessible’ is highly imaginative and playful, a beautifully constructed homage to Lucia Joyce which draws crucial attention to her little known, hidden talent as a surrealist writer.”
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