In this special Film Ireland podcast, Naemi Victoria talks to Feargal Ward (Tin City) & Sophie Somerville (Fwends), whose films both premiered at Berlinale in 2025.
Tin City (Feargal Ward)
We see clips of what looks like fragments of found footage from a dystopian, imagined town. Disembodied mannequin heads turn menacingly on a system of turntables. A bar, a bank, a shop – each location reveals another iteration of the same macabre set-up. Against this backdrop, a German television news program investigates. The secret nature of the site, located in a remote forest in northwest Germany, is revealed: it is an urban combat facility called “Tin City,” created by the British army to train its soldiers for foreign wars. The murder of the German wife of a British soldier sparks more media interest in this facility. An interview between a journalist and a spokesperson for the Irish underground terror organization – the IRA – informs us about why the Northern Ireland “Troubles” have come to mainland Europe.
[https://www.berlinale.de/en/2025/programme/202516904.html]
Fwends (Sophie Somerville)
Walk and talk in Melbourne: Em has travelled from Sydney to visit her friend Jessie. They don’t have any plans – and there isn’t even a proper duvet for Em, although the two young women won’t be sleeping anyway. For soon their sweet, smart babbling is in full flow, moving from the banal to the heavy and back again. Both of them are lost in their own way: Em because her supposed dream job comes with an exploitative, misogynous climate; Jessie because she’s now in a vacuum following a break-up. The hours they share become a space of play, just as their slacker-like movements through the city turn into an observation of themselves and those around them. Fwends alights upon the diffuse, sensitive realm between late adolescence and adult life, or, as director Sophie Somerville fittingly describes it, “how being in your 20s means staring into a dark, deep, meaningless void.” Yet the film hews closer to comedy than to drama, as analyses of the difficult present are delivered with costumes and special effects, with rap and improvisation. Made without a big budget, Fwends goes to unexpected places – and is also a declaration of love to a metropolis in spring.
[https://www.berlinale.de/en/2025/programme/202500263.html]
Feargal Ward
Feargal Ward is a filmmaker and artist based between Dublin & Berlin.
His practice is largely concerned with the hybrid-documentary form, where tropes and devices of narrative cinema are often appropriated or subverted in an attempt to facilitate the telling of greater truths.
His latest film Tin City will premiere at the Berlinale in 2025 and will screen in competition at Cinéma du Réel In Paris in March.
His previous short film Lowland (co-directed with Adrian Duncan) premiered at Cork International Film Festival in 2022 where it won best director for an Irish short.
His ‘Reel Art’ film Tension Structures (with Adrian Duncan) premiered at IDFA 2019 before screening at HotDocs (Toronto) in 2020.
His feature documentary The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid premiered in the main competition at IDFA in 2017 and screened at multiple festivals worldwide before being broadcast on German, Irish and Finnish television.
His debut feature doc Yximalloo (co-directed with Tadhg O’Sullivan) premiered at FID Marseille in 2014 where it won the Prix Premier.
Sophie Somerville
Sophie Somerville is a filmmaker based in Naarm (Melbourne). Her shorts PEEPS (2020) and LINDA 4 EVA (2023) have screened and won awards at festivals including Telluride Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival and Melbourne International Film Festival. Her first feature film FWENDS premiered at Berlinale in 2025 and was the first Australian film to win the Caligari Film Prize, honouring stylistic and thematic innovation in the craft.
