Acheron

Directed by Tommy Creagh / Ireland / 2021 / 16 mins

Synopsis

Christy, a myth-obsessed playwright in his late twenties, finds himself stuck in a rut as he constantly clashes with his father. They go for a tense walk by the local estuary to clear the air, but ghosts wait beside the water. Acheron is a film exploring family, grief, and the creative process.

Director Statement

I wanted to create something that I could connect to as someone in their late twenties living in Ireland at a time when all my friends, especially artists, seemed to be moving back in with their folks. The conversation between the father and son in the kitchen is almost word for word a real conversation I had with my own father that I thought said something pertinent about fathers and sons, one generation and the last, and from there I built the story of Acheron.

Christy and his father are both worriers, it is the inheritance that is passed down through the family, rather like a curse in one of the doomed houses of Greek Myth, continuing to haunt them as history repeats itself. Every family has a secret like this, and each their own cross to bear, their family curse if you will.

The title also refers to a river in myth that connects the land of the living to the underworld, and as the characters walk along their local estuary the shifting water, like the Acheron, seems to drag them into a different state. I have always had a strong connection to water, growing up by an estuary myself where my grandparent’s ashes are scattered. I think this is one of the reasons I associate water with death, and perhaps life beyond as well as water is mutable and migrational, like a channel between worlds, bridging the material and the abstract.

Credits

Directed, produced and written by: Tommy Creagh

Director Bio

Tommy Creagh is an award winning English-Irish writer & director with a passion for expressive lyrical storytelling with great performances at the centre. He graduated from Bristol UWE in 2017 with a 1st Class Honours Degree in Filmmaking, and since then he has been making short films, music videos, and theatre. His films have won several awards and been shown at over 50 film festivals around the world, and his music videos have received over 100K hits to date. His most notable films are Father of the Man (Winner of Best Short Film at the Vienna Independent Film Festival), & Land of Winter (Winner of Best Irish Short at the Dublin International Film Festival & Best Young Talent at the New Renaissance Film Festival.