By Kit Whitfield 
Yes, These ARE Your Mother’s Fairies
Fréwaka and the trauma of a nation.
Content warnings: suicide, abuse, child death, false imprisonment, torture, murder.
Don’t say their name. It draws their attention – and if they look at you, you might never be seen by mortal eyes again.
You might call them the wee folk. The Good People. If you knew their history you might call them the Tuatha Dé Danann: those shapeshifters and weather-makers who live in the Otherworld beneath our feet. Or you might, if you dared, call them the sídhe.
Don’t call them fairies. They don’t like it.
Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain) just calls them ‘them’. It might not be enough to save her.
Ireland used to be their country once. What you need to know is this: in that time, they were at war.
This is an old tale, a foundation myth. It’s the story of ferocious warriors. They displaced the Fir Bolg in the First Battle of Mag Tuired. Then they fought among themselves for leadership. Then they fought the Second Battle of Mag Tuired against the monstrous Formorians. They won that, but they lost out finally to the Milesians – the last race to settle Ireland, according to legend, and the forebears of Irish people of today.
The Milesian poet Amergin was asked to divide the land, and the sneaky fecker split it up like this: above ground belonged to the Milesians now, while the Tuatha Dé Danann got everything underneath.
In some stories this wasn’t too bad for them. Their Otherworld is Tír na nÓg, the land of youth, where changeless abundance rules. Mortals can visit if invited, but if you go and come back again, you’ll find centuries have passed and you’ll crumble into corpse-dust as soon as your foot touches soil.
But there are other stories of them.
Even today, modern farmers might plough around a fairy mound rather than risk disturbing it. Why ask for trouble? In 1999 folklorist Eddie Lenihan led a campaign that lasted ten years to stop the Latoon fairy bush being cut down to make way for the M18 motorway. That bush still stands.
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/away-with-the-faeries-1.1725375?page=1
Lenihan was doing his job as a seanchaí – a storyteller-historian – warning that to destroy the tree would be to risk the displeasure of powerful, sacred and vindictive forces. And one of the things he reported was that he’d seen lumps of green gore at its foot, evidence of ‘fairy battles around the bush the night before . . . It was a meeting point for Munster fairies to battle with Connaught fairies.’
https://www.thejournal.ie/fairy-bush-co-clare-4604485-Apr2019
The Good People aren’t at peace. Sometimes they aren’t even good.
In particular, they are kidnappers.
One of the great tales, one that comes back over and over, is the story of the changeling. They come, and they see someone they want – and they snatch that person away. Often it’s a baby, but it can be a virgin as well, or a bride. Someone close to the liminal spaces where life is on the turn.
‘Thin places,’ Peig calls them. Places where women do most of the work.
What do they want with you? Well, it varies. Sometimes their kidnapped victims are put to work; they take servants. Sometimes . . . well, we just don’t know. Sometimes the stolen person doesn’t come back to tell the tale.
So how do you tell such a tale?
I’m going to be a little personal in this one because it’s a subject I’ve tackled as a writer myself, and as such I particularly admire what writer-director Aislinn Clarke did with her film
Fréwaka. So I hope you’ll bear with me; I’m going to talk about my own work and my own family history. It seems in the spirit of Fréwaka to talk of generational fuck-ups.
For starters: this is a consciously, intensely Irish film, and English people talking about Ireland can be a touchy business, history being what it is. So for the record – I’m a Londoner myself, but my mother is Irish. (So Irish that she declined to take British citizenship despite marrying an Englishman and raising two children here. So Irish that ‘very English’ is what she calls people she doesn’t like.) In fact our family used to be the hereditary seanachies of Gleann Concadhain, though next to the likes of Eddie Lenihan we’re pretty shabby: there are two family legends about our service in that line and they’re both cases of some male ancestor of ours making an absolute fool of himself.
I’ll recount these shenanigans, partly to share my shame and partly because they give you a flavour of what kind of folklore and history we’re up against in films like this. One, recounted by Ordinance Survey correspondent John O’Donovan in 1834, reports that the famous 16th-17th-century Irish historian Geoffrey Keating came all the way to County Derry to visit an ancestor of mine and asked to see his inherited records.
However, because Keating’s previous writings hadn’t paid enough attention to the history of Ulster, ‘the most distinguished Province in Ireland,’ in my ancestor’s implacable opinion, the stubborn eejit ‘therefore refused to give Keating any information from the vast collection of Annals and other documents he had then before him.’
The great historian hadn’t favoured his region. So he wouldn’t help him.
What happened in Irish history? Sometimes things are lost in the spirit of conflict.
The other, as told by my grandfather, is this:
The documents suffered a very sad fate . . . According to my father the oral tradition was that they had been kept under one roof. There was about to be ‘Stations’ [prayers recited at various homes across a community] in that house. The local schoolmaster, who enjoyed an undeserved reputation for learning, was asked to scrutinise them, but he could make nothing of them. He gave his opinion that they had to do with ‘The Black Art’, and advised that they be burnt before the arrival of the priest. That was done!
Up in smoke went a lot of Irish history – and you’ll notice it was done because of fear of the Church.
Those are records of what the men got up to.
What life was for the women of the family – well, until recent times, that’s not the kind of story that got written down. But even in living memory, sometimes it wasn’t pretty.
What had you to fear in Ireland?
Well, a whole lot of things. Conquest was one of them; my grandfather told another tale of how he ‘wet his pants for Ireland’ as he watched his father wind up British soldiers just after the 1916 Rebellion. This wasn’t childish cowardice; in that time and place he was right to be afraid. Soldiers were shooting people without trial; my great-grandfather was lucky not to get a bullet in his head.
In documented as well as folkloric history, Ireland is an invaded nation, a nation that fought amongst itself in aftermaths, whose trees have their own gore scattered at the roots.
And then there’s the Catholic Church. In many ways Catholicism is a badge of national pride, a faith that denotes an ethnicity: in the North, unless there’s been some converting or marrying going on, you can tell a person’s religion from their name. Fionnuala O’Sullivan and Vicky Smith do not worship in the same church. The important difference between those religions in Ireland isn’t doctrinal; it’s tribal.
But Catholicism is a fearsome faith, and the threat of Hell was no small thing for much of Irish history. What the Church’s people did to children in orphanages, to ‘fallen women’ in Magdalen laundries, to their own flocks, is a deep scar across the nation.
Fréwaka understands this.
Here’s the story in simple terms.
Opening scene: a wedding, 1973. There’s some folk traditions around: straw masks, a garlanded goat. The bride steps out the back to be sick – she’s pregnant, which means she’s very lucky her man agreed to marry her. The last Magdalen laundry didn’t close its doors until 1996.
She isn’t safe, though. Her husband goes out to see what’s happened to her . . . and she isn’t there. All that’s left is her wedding ring on the ground: a gold claddagh, its heart no longer pointing towards hers.
Next scene: ‘Inniu’, the caption informs over a cityscape, before changing to another caption that translates it: ‘Today.’
This is a film where most of the dialogue will take place in Irish. We’ll see it through our heroine Shoo – short for Siubhán, pronounced SHOO-un, played by Clare Monelly. She talks English to officials. She speaks it to her pregnant fiancée Mila, because Mila’s Ukrainian and they need a common language and Shoo’s Ukrainian is still in its early stages. But Irish is her mother-tongue.
Keep in mind the word ‘mother’.
You have to be a little patient watching Fréwaka. Shudder reviewers use the phrase ‘slow-burn’, but if I have a criticism it’s that its opening act is a little poorly paced. We begin with not one flashback but two before we meet Shoo at all.
First there’s the wedding, the disappearance of a woman called Peig (pronounced ‘Peg’, more or less). Put a pin in it, we’ll meet Peig later.
Then first there’s this scene: the suicide of Shoo’s mother. It feels like a heartless thing to say about a scene of suicide, but it slows down our engagement: if we’d jumped straight to Shoo and had shorter flashbacks scattered throughout to communicate what happened to her mother it would probably hook more viewers.
Stay with it, it’ll get good, and remember that it’s all relevant – but yes, you do have to wait a bit.
However, the suicide itself is another scene of – well, you know how the movie’s name is Fréwaka? It’s an Anglicisation of ‘fréamhacha,’ which means ‘roots’. There are a lot of cultural echoes in this moment.
The room is a spiritual disaster zone. Shoo’s mother, we later learn, was a kind of manic religious abuser, burning her with cigarettes if she couldn’t recite prayers perfectly. In the name of God, she did terrible things. And here in this room is an impossible contrast.
If you are a Catholic, you do not kill yourself. That’s a mortal sin. Straight to hell.
But this room is absolutely full of – well, an American might call it ‘Jesus junk’, but since we’re in Ireland I’m going to call it ‘holy tat’. Cheap statues of the Blessed Virgin and the Child of Prague, a rosary-draped crucifix, full-on high-kitsch Catholic iconography everywhere you look. As this poor woman sings an eerie song, all of being lost and defenceless against what sounds like very unchristian things, she reels around in a white dress – like a bride, but also like a First Communicant.
If you can read the iconography this scene will give you a cracking headache. It’s unnervingly wrong.
But here’s something else that Fréwaka understands: Irish folklore and Irish Catholicism have a connection.
British bigots called it ‘superstition’. ‘Morbid’ is another word that was popular. But Irish traditions are ritualistic. There are forces around you and you do things to appease them.
Folk tales in which a prayer banishes an unwanted spirit aren’t uncommon. Some medieval writers considered the Tuatha Dé Danann fallen angels. I have vivid memories of visiting a cousin’s house in Ireland and finding it crammed with books about recent sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary, its writers on the watch for Her to pop up in the world the way a fairy might step suddenly out of a hollow hill.
Don’t take this wrong: there are plenty of modern thinkers among the Irish Catholic, and plenty of doctrinally pure ones. It’s as normal as any other country, which may not be saying much. But there’s also this strain of Celtic Santería where the Church is Catholic, but the practice has, well . . . roots.
And with faith well and truly evoked and profaned, the proper story begins.
Shoo is a professional carer. She and her mother were estranged by her terrible childhood, and while her fiancée Mila wants her to participate in going through the inherited belongings, Shoo wants none of it. Her past is full of pain, and she just wants to move forward.
So when her phone pings up with a new job offer – an elderly woman recovering from a stroke who needs an Irish-speaking home help for a few weeks – she can’t wait to take it and get out of there. Toss it all, she tells Mila; don’t even ask me about it. It can all go. I don’t want any of this.
Shoo isn’t going to get what she wants.
When she first got the job offer she thought her client Peig only needed physical assistance. As soon as she gets there she realises things aren’t quite that simple: Peig refuses to let her in and pisses under the door.
When she checks the paperwork, oh look – it did say that Peig had paranoia and mental health issues. She hadn’t noticed before, for some reason.
Shoo is really good at her job, though, and she’s made of stern stuff. She breaks in, finds Peig, calms her down, strikes up a rapport with her and settles in to look after her.
What’s wrong with Peig?
Well, she has a door in her house that looks like this.
She has a ‘fairy-tree’ on her property that looks like this:
The notes say she’s mentally ill. Or at least they do the second time Shoo looks at them.
Peig is very insistent about certain things. Bad smells repel them, she says; it’s good to stink of cigarettes. You should wear at least one of your garments inside-out. Avoid music. Cover the mirrors. They don’t like pure metal, salt or piss, which is why Peig greeted Shoo by pissing under the door: she assumed it was one of them coming to get her.
If you’re familiar with fairy lore this is all very traditional stuff. Turning clothes inside-out, for instance, is how you find your way back if you’ve been ‘pixy-led’, which is to say led in circles when you were trying to follow a path. There are things you do to ward them off, and sometimes they work.
Shoo feels she understands this. It’s obsessive-compulsive behaviour, attempts to contain anxiety. Her own mother used to do the same thing; for her it was prayers and religion rather than folklore and wards, but it’s the same thing at heart, isn’t it?
Yes. Yes it is.
Shoo is very used to being around a woman who’s certain there’s something terrible coming for her. But while she insists she didn’t love her violent mother, she is coming to love Peig. Peig is rude, snappish, bossy, but she’s smart and interesting and she has a sense of humour. For all her willingness to stink, she has the dignity of a woman refusing to be babied.
There’s a fundamental kindness to Peig. She’ll yell if Shoo disturbs her protections, but the rest of the time she’s quite nice. She’s completely unfazed by Shoo being gay, for instance, dismissing Shoo’s hints she might be shocked with a brisk, ‘Young people always think they invented everything.’ She’s like Shoo’s mother except that she treats Shoo well.
But it can’t be all paranoia. Something terrible did happen to Peig.
Her back is horribly scarred. That’s not a mental disorder, it’s trauma made flesh.
Who hurt Peig? It wasn’t her husband; Peig is convincingly scornful of the suggestion. It was them, she says. Punishment.
‘They hate us, you know,’ she tells Shoo with weary grief. She doesn’t try to explain why. It’s just how it is.
Of course this isn’t what Shoo believes. These weren’t the terrors she was raised with; hers were all religious. But there’s something the same about both. Peig is afraid of the ‘down there’ under the earth; Shoo was raised to be afraid of the ‘down there’ of Hell. Both places of hatred and punishment. Both places you’ll do anything to keep from being dragged back into.
What happened to Peig? Fundamentally, Ireland happened to her.
It’s not for nothing that most of the dialogue is in Irish, but that’s not all there is to it. The scars on Peig’s back are only the physical expression of the earth beneath her and Shoo’s feet.
It wasn’t ‘a priest, a doctor or a nun’ that took Peig away, she says, but them. But it might have been any of those three. None of them are implausible explanations for why a pregnant girl might have disappeared to a place of absolute suffering. A friendly neighbour confides such gossip as anyone knows about Peig, but all they’ve got is that she’s thought to have been in an asylum, or possibly a Magdalen laundry.
‘Terrible how they used to treat people,’ the neighbour says regretfully. What else can you say?
But when Peig describes what it was like down there, this is what she says:
A madhouse. A famine village. A laundry house. A coffin ship. A field, poisoned with blight. A street full of blood and bullets. Hundreds of bodies piled into a septic tank.
A coffin ship, in case you don’t know, is what they called the horrendous vessels that carried those who could afford to flee the Great Famine, rotten floating prisons with a 20-50% death rate.
The street full of bullets – well, take your pick. An uprising, a civil conflict, a police massacre? Bloody Sunday, maybe? But which? The one in 1913, 1920, 1921 or 1972? Irish history doesn’t lack for blood in the streets.
And the bodies in a septic tank is what they did to the seven hundred and ninety-six infants that died at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam. Seven hundred and ninety-six babies.
‘Punishment,’ Peig says.
Why? This is what they did. What answer could be big enough?
Who are they? This is what they did. What answer could be numerous enough?
There have been times enough when Ireland held Hell on earth.
There are terrible things beneath the ground you stand on. You can try to keep them out, but they won’t stay down. This is the earth your roots drink from.
Fréwaka doesn’t make this explicit – but there’s gender running throughout this movie.
It isn’t just that the leads are female, or that Shoo is marrying another woman. You start to notice after a while that you don’t see many men around – and when you do, it’s usually a sign of danger.
Not universally; Shoo is warned off seeing Peig by a male bus driver. But once she gets there, men become . . . eerie.
At Peg’s wedding, a gang of wicker-masked men turn up leading a garlanded goat. ‘Who invited them?’ she asks her husband uncomfortably.
‘Nobody invites them,’ he says cheerily. ‘That’s the point.’
And the more we see them – and the more we don’t see them in any kind of reassuring context – the more unsettling male figures become.
Shoo, looking for Peig’s house, encounters a staring young lad holding a leashed goat in the road.
In the ‘wake house’, where they lay out the dead bodies, a man turns and stares at her unsmiling from the doorway.
Shoo starts to have dark dreams, apparitions of hooded male figures.
But by the time we finally confront something unquestionably fey . . .
. . . well, the fact that it’s masculine is hardly a surprise. Men and maleness, by their very absence from normality, haunt this film like spectres.
What is a woman’s world?
By choice and out of love, Shoo was going to live a life mostly female. She and Mila are getting married; maybe their baby will be a son, but it’ll be a woman-led house. The sperm donor is a male friend of theirs, an amicable arrangement; there will be no challenge for who this little one’s mammies really are. Shoo wasn’t avoiding men as such; they just weren’t what she wanted to build her life around.
But this is what Peig tells her:
Women do the death work, and for weddings, especially in Ireland. The wedding, the birthing, the nursing and the keening.
And however modern she is, Shoo can’t deny that this is still pretty much true. What does she do for a living if not nursing? This is ‘woman’s work.’
This is also the ‘thin places’ where they get in.
And Shoo, nursing Peig, is about to get married, about to become a parent, and has just lost a mother she’s fighting hard not to keen for. She is walking through a place that’s very, very thin.
Was all the pain of Ireland’s history male-inflicted? Absolutely not. A lot of the worst things done to women and girls – the mother-and-baby homes, the Magdalen laundries – were done by nuns, women sacramentally committed to a life without men.
But that punishment they inflicted was about men too. Nuns take a vow of obedience to the Church, and there are no female Popes, Cardinals, bishops or priests within it. The ‘fallen women’ they tortured were girls who had been with men, real, ordinary flesh-and-blood men, in ways unsanctioned by that celibate, womanless patriarchy.
There’s a spectre in Ireland beyond the fey. Fathers without children consecrated Mothers that destroyed mothers.
A lot of what gets done to women is scapegoating. Speaking of the Tuam horrors, then-Taoseach Enda Kenny remarked sarcastically: ‘Indeed, for a while it seemed as if in Ireland our women had a remarkable ability to self-impregnate.’
He was right that all the punishment fell on the girls, but even then he fell short in the eyes of female survivor advocates. Independent politician Catherine Conolly replied, accusing him of making light of the horror: ‘A shocking discovery, according to everyone, and particularly to yourself Taoiseach. But this is something that Galway has been aware of for a long time . . . None of this is shocking to the survivors.’ ‘I don’t doubt your bona fides,’ she said of his snarky speech which still failed to guarantee the site would be treated as a crime scene, ‘but I certainly doubt your judgement.’
Shoo didn’t want any of this. Peig didn’t either; she was just a pregnant girl trying to make a respectable marriage to the father of her baby. But it didn’t save them. Men haunt this landscape; women do the labour of suffering. Whoever did the sin, the ‘death work’ includes bearing the punishment.
I won’t spoil the details of what happens at the denouement except to say watch the credits as well. What I will say is that pregnancy matters in this story. Peig was pregnant when they came. Mila is pregnant now. And this isn’t a place where mothers are safe.
And this ties to one of the oldest and slipperiest tales of all: the changeling.
The child-stealer, that sometimes just takes a baby and sometimes leaves something behind. I won’t go into how, but let’s say that Rumpelstiltskin is not the only story of one of them wanting to take away someone too vulnerable to protect themselves.
How on earth do you tell a changeling story kindly?
Here’s where I get personal again, because playing with folklore is a big part of how I write and it’s a question I’ve wrestled with myself. You can answer that question in different ways – but you have to ask it. Some myths are fairy creatures: neither bad nor good, but dangerous if addressed without care.
It came to me because I was writing stories about what I called ‘fairy-smiths’, ironworkers who specialise in the kind of talismans that keep them – what I called the People – away. It gave me the chance, and also the obligation, to try my hand at a lot of famous fairy lore, and after a certain point I realised that I couldn’t write these stories without taking on a child-stealer or a changeling at some point. It’s too important a part of the mythology.
But the more I went back and forth, the more I realised something: I didn’t want to write a changeling. It’s too entwined with the history of children getting hurt – and I never, ever wanted to write a story in which hurting children was the right thing to do. I don’t like The Omen. I don’t like The Exorcist. [Link to the Exorcist piece on that last sentence? https://gnofhorror.com/leap-of-faith-exorcising-the-exorcist/] I don’t like Orphan. Some stories aren’t fey; they’re demonic. There are people in the world who hurt children because they think it’s the righteous thing to do – and later, other people dig up the tiny bones.
If you want to read further on the folklore I’d recommend Richard Sugg’s Fairies: A Dangerous History, but the short version is this: when people thought they’d encountered a child-stealer, they’d think the real child was a fey substitution. Then they’d abuse that child. The mythology held that if you threw a child on the fire or made it stand on an iron shovel all night, the fairies would be moved by pity for the changeling and take it back, returning ‘your’ child in exchange.
Which was a clear path for delusional parents – or a good excuse for parents who were simply cruel.
For my part, I found I just didn’t have it in me to write a story in which a parent mistreating their child was in the right. I have a child of the kind that might very well have been considered a changeling back in the day: beautiful, neurodivergent, passionate and entirely himself, speaking a mother-tongue that isn’t quite English and living by rules that aren’t quite Christian. Who knows what he might have been called?
Who knows, in another modern generation, where he might have been locked up and what they would have done to him there?
That’s the thing about these stories. Do you have learning difficulties or a mental illness? Are you an orphan or the child of a single mother? Did you ever commit a petty crime like shoplifting? Were you abused? Are you a woman who slept with a man she hadn’t married? These are all people such places caught in their nets.
To the wrong person, the monster is us.
I solved it another way: I figured that that if I was writing heroes who claimed to protect a community, that had to include protecting children from people as well as from the People. Sometimes the diagnosis is negative; sometimes the verdict is innocent. Child-stealers I could believe, magical or otherwise, but anything that supported the idea of rejecting a child went against my heart. I became more interested in the likelihood that if there were fey creatures, mortals would mess with their children. It’s not as if that isn’t a sin humans commit.
(Since the real horror is the capitalism we made along the way, you can buy the books here: tinyurl.com/nvvetupj.)
I could believe in talking bushes and versifying pigs and flaming dogs that eat landlords, but I couldn’t believe in changelings. I couldn’t believe in anything that would ever make it right to harm a child. We have enough horror in what we do to each other without needing to blame it on outside forces.
Sometimes, in the name of protecting children, adults destroy children. Sometimes, in the name of virtue, people torture. Childless Fathers; women punished for having children by sacramental Mothers. How can you possibly describe such obscenity?
Clarke understands the purpose of horror.
There are many virtues to the fantastic, but to my mind the greatest is this: you can use it to speak of what ordinary words cannot contain. One way to speak of pain is to elevate it to the mythic – and in the process, give it the scale it deserves.
Lives were stolen in Ireland, by murder, by starvation, by false imprisonment, over and over and over again. Stealing girls and stealing children permeates this story. And it’s telling that when we finally do see a fairy – when we’re absolutely sure we see one for the first time – she looks like this:
It’s a Victorian idea that fairies are pretty little creatures with shimmering wings. This woman comes in the traditional fairy form: she looks human. She looks well-groomed. She looks higher-class than you; as far as Shoo knows she’s her professional supervisor, come to inspect how Shoo is complying with the regulations.
Shoo jokes that their preference for the ‘thin places’ of births, marriages and deaths is ‘Very bureaucratic’ – but is she all wrong? It was bureaucrats in Britain who exported grain during the Famine. It was bureaucrats who failed to enforce legislation that would have made the coffin ships survivable. It was bureaucrats who incorporated the Magdalen laundries into Ireland’s penal structure. Every madhouse and church and army and government is upheld by an organised administration. That’s how they’re able to do what they do.
What is bureaucracy if not a container for power?
This is what they are. They are beings that have power and do not love you.
So why on earth wouldn’t they come in the guise of an official?
For lifetimes, Irish officialdom let women be stolen away. The homes and the laundries were authorised by the government.
Fairy lore is never untainted by human authority.
Even when it happens unofficially, these structures contain us. In 1895, Bridget Cleary disappeared. She was twenty-six years old, a cooper’s wife. She was more independent than most women of her age; she had no children, but instead worked as both a chicken farmer and dressmaker, the proud owner of not only a flock of hens but a Singer sewing machine.
The coroner’s report said that she had been burned to death. Nine people were charged and five were tried; all but one of the five were men. Her husband was one of them: he had convinced the others that it wasn’t Mary they were torturing, but a fairy changeling that looked just like her.
There’s a little rhyme about her. Are you a witch? Are you a fairy? Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?
None of these were a safe thing to be.
What happened? Well, Bridget got sick; she went out to sell eggs in bad weather, and on the way home she caught a chill. Michael thought she’d changed somehow. He was so sure it wasn’t Bridget he involved a doctor and a priest in the case – and neither man saved her.
Nowadays there’s a different theory: Michael might have been suffering from Capgrass syndrome. But between a woman catching a cold as she went about her work, and a man far, far sicker than that, who got burned alive and who got believed?
(Source here; be warned it’s graphic: https://tinyurl.com/2c4w6hk6)
This is a killing myth. But it isn’t the powerless who have been doing the killing.
And that’s where we are in the end. It may be punishment, it may be hatred. But punishment for what? What did you do to be so hated? That isn’t the point.
The point is that you come to a place where you can be hurt, and those that hurt you can say you deserve it.
This is a story invaded people know. This is a story women people know. This is a story anyone knows if they’ve been on the other side of power. Why are they punishing you? What did you do?
You didn’t. They just hate you. And around here, you aren’t the one who says what people deserve.
Fréwaka isn’t a film of simple answers.
It’s a film of generational trauma. Shoo is trying for hope: her childhood was full of madness and anguish and all she wants to do is live a peaceful life with her sweet girl and start a better family. Peig, too, is a loving person; the tenderness that grows between her and Shoo is raw and real.
But to get to your longed-for future you have to pass through thin places. And nobody invited them, but they come anyway.
Fréwaka isn’t flawless. It has a slow start in the way of stories that carry a lot of past and don’t deliver it as smoothly as they might. It won’t give you a comforting ending.
But it’s beautiful and heartfelt, ferociously intelligent, and knows folklore and history like mother-tongues, blending them in a synthesis that can’t be explained by logic but feels purely, intuitively true.
Excuse me. I need to go hug my kid now. With what little power I have, I want someone to have a loving mother.