The No Show

A short film exploring intergenerational trauma, absence and loss among the men of Ireland

Inspired by working-class men known not to turn up, The No Show is an attempt to experience the absence they create and to explore their internal world. Who didn’t show up for them? To understand them, we need to meet their fathers and their grandfathers. Like Russian dolls, we complicate the narrative about them. Over two years, Catherine O’Halloran and Grace Dyas worked with young men in Limerick City Build to devise a trauma-informed contemporary art film that tells the origin story of trauma experienced by generations of working-class families. The film presents visceral flickers of loss, abuse, banality, to represent absence and emptiness, and to explore how we might show up for ourselves.