Writer/Director/Producer - Jon Hozier-Byrne
DoP - Tommy Fitzgerald
Editor - Darragh Moran

Music videos are really peculiar medium for filmmaking, as you’re creating a piece to sit alongside another piece of art, from another artist, over which you have no input. It’s a really odd intersection between adaptation and advertisement, working with musicians who are simultaneously collaborators and clients. As such, whenever possible, I find the most important step in devising a music video is sitting down with the songwriters and interrogating the lyrics, tone, and intention behind a track, ideally before you allow your preconceptions to take hold.

This video is an excellent example of when this process works well - upon hearing the track for the first time, I had an entirely separate concept for this video ready to go, but in conversation with the songwriters, my perception of the track completely changed. They expressed to me that this was a song for their sister, who had struggled repeatedly with mental health issues, and their frustration at the social stigma surrounding the topic. As such, I devised an entirely new concept; a performance video set in the women’s cells underneath Grangegorman, formerly the Richmond Lunatic Asylum. Here, generations of Irish women were cruelly incarcerated and abandoned, often justified with diagnoses like ‘melancholia’, ‘masterbation’, or ‘hysterical menstruation.’ Conceptually, the intent was contrast the hopeful, empathetic subtext of the lyrics against the legacy of the Irish state’s treatment of women with mental health issues.