A film by Claire Delany. Shot on 16mm by Daisy Bolger. An Ithaca College Thesis film.
After escaping tragedy, a young girl embarks on a northbound pilgrimage where she must confront her own trauma, and a strange Circean magic she struggles to control.
Note from the director:
In The Odyssey, Odysseus’ men are turned into swine on Aeaea by Circe, a powerful witch who resides there. She is the villain of that story. Madeline Miller’s Circe retells Circe’s story, who did not turn Odysseus’ men into pigs out of evil, but out of self-defense, after they attempted to rape her.
The idea for Swine came to me in high school- right in the midst of the “Me Too” movement. Close to 500,000 women are raped or sexually assaulted in the United States per year, and these are the ones we know about. So often, like in Circe’s story, and in Sophie’s story, women’s stories of assault get twisted around. They get turned into the villain. Or they get glamorized, or sexualized.
Swine tells the beginning of one girl’s road to self-discovery and self- forgiveness after she is assaulted. It does not try to make this journey into something it is not- it is ugly, and hard, and not linear, and often times there is a gray line between right and wrong. But there are moments of hope, of friendship, of sisterhood. Swine is for all of the girls that deserve to be told that it will get better, that it wasn’t their fault, and that their stories deserve to take up space. There is never a wrong time to tell a girl that she is strong, that she is beautiful, and that she is capable.
Swine is my gift to these girls, and to my high school self.
Claire Delany
cdelany@ithaca.edu
Daisy Bolger
daisybolgerfilms@gmail.com