When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the city entered a period of great change. People were arriving. Things were happening. One day, a department store on 54 Oranienburger Straße was taken over by artists who came in to squat. They called their new space “Tacheles”, after the Yiddish word for “straight-talking”, referring to the kind of direct art they intended to do.
One of the performances that took place in Tacheles was by an Irish student, Neasa Hardiman. After attending NCAD, she had won a scholarship to the Universität der Künste to study under the sculptor Rebecca Horn, whose body extension pieces are considered fundamental to the feminist art movement.
Hardiman grew up in Dublin. At the age of seven she read Ulysses – “probably because I was the youngest of five children”. But the choice wasn’t a singular precocious venture: during her childhood, she’d be reading “a book a day sometimes, and certainly two novels a week”.
Drawing was a really big thing for Hardiman the child. She spent time making maps, and little books resembling film storyboards. She also attended a German-speaking primary school, and a secondary school that had been the first girls school in the country to get a physics lab – Muckross, “run by the Dominicans”. It was very academic, and though she’d absolutely loved that, the affection had a drawback: “When it came to choosing a third-level course I was sort of at a loss. I didn’t want to give up anything.” So Hardiman went to art school. She figured that there, “nothing was out of bounds”.
When it came to choosing a third-level course I was sort of at a loss. I didn’t want to give up anything
After her scholarship ended, she left Berlin. She says of her transition back into 1990s Dublin that “it’s in the nature of Irish people that we travel, that we go away and educate ourselves, and sometimes when you do that it can be hard to come home”. But she had something to sweeten the deal – an invitation to work for RTÉ as a graphic designer. Besides, she “didn’t feel like I was leaving something behind, but rather that I had drawn something from it and was going to do something new”.
She was right. “Dublin in the 1990s was growing and was transforming pretty rapidly. We were moving up towards the Boom. It did feel like there was a lot of opportunity.” In the studios of RTÉ, she found herself learning new technologies that were just coming-of-age – Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI), stock and live-action animation. It was also a good time to be a graphic designer, in the heyday of gorgeous and expensive title-sequences (“the opening 30 seconds”).
Then, in 1995, RTÉ unveiled a new logo, its present one. Hardiman was the designer. At the time, the station was also running a competition, every five years, offering the winner the opportunity to train as a producer-director. Hardiman applied and won a place.
She learned more skills. She was trained to lead a multi-camera studio, and to be a documentary-filmmaker. Then, when she was “let loose”, she directed Blackbox, an arts programme for which she hired another bright young woman – “this absolutely brilliant presenter called Keelin Shanley, who was the best collaborator”. For a year, they worked with gusto.
Fair City was the first time I’d really properly engaged with actors, and it was just thrilling
Then, after working in current affairs on Prime Time, Hardiman became the youngest ever director of Fair City. This, she says, was “kind of the opposite of everything I had been doing until then, as the directing, the actual imagery, had to be really, really curtailed”. Rather, performance was the thing. “It was the first time I’d really properly engaged with actors, and it was just thrilling.” The alchemy on set made her decision to become a director of dramas.
But, in addition to making choices concerning her path forward, Hardiman was also pursuing a PhD in film theory in Trinity, which was followed by a second masters degree in aesthetics and politics. Academia appealed to her, she says, because it let her ask “why?” rather than “how?”. But her studies weren’t just academically progressive (her PhD thesis was about mainstream cinema as a means for social and political intervention) – they were clever on a practical level: she was informing her own creative practice. Her PhD was written on the directors she most admired: Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, and Ang Lee. “The level of rigour that goes with that kind of thinking and reading has really seriously informed my practice in ways that I’m probably not even completely aware of.”
After leaving RTÉ, she made a series of short films, one of which was very successful. Olive (2005), bears the mark of what she had been thinking about, an unlikely combination of an Irish language film telling a queer moment of discovery, told through the sweet, saturated hues of 1990s pop culture. It was screened at the Berlin Film Festival.
Since, Hardiman has been embracing opportunities in TV and screened drama, getting to make the kind of work she’d been harkening to: “Very grounded, emotitonally truthful, chatacter rich thrillers with quite a distinctive feminist voice.” In 2010, she won a BAFTA for her directing of Tracy Beaker Returns, and in 2015 she claimed the same award for BBC crime–drama Happy Valley.
In the same year, Hardiman directed two episodes of Amazon’s Z: The Beginning of Everything about Zelda Sayre, deified as “the first American flapper” by her husband F Scott Fitzgerald. Last year, Hardiman created her debut feature film, Sea Fever. It’s a story about the ecological crisis, neurodivergence and cognitive difference, the scientific method and magical thinking “told in the language of the thriller”.
If Hardiman’s life comes across as exceptional, I wonder how she reconciles that with stories intended for everyone? So I ask how story-telling relates to her own life. She emphasises the need to look beyond yourself, and refers to Terence, the classical poet: “Asked ‘how can you be a poet who writes theatre for the Roman stage about lords and ladies when you are a slave?’, he replied: ‘I am human, there is nothing human that is alien to me.’”
Sea Fever has its Irish premiere at the Dublin International Film Festival on March 7th. Neasa Hardiman will be in attendance.
