Irish Production Cultures and Women Producers: Nicky Gogan

Canning, Laura ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6270-0657 (2020) Irish Production Cultures and Women Producers: Nicky Gogan. In: Women in the Irish Film Industry: Stories and Storytellers. Cork University Press, Cork, Republic of Ireland. ISBN 9781782053736

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Abstract / Summary

This chapter explores the work of Nicky Gogan from 2006-2016 in an effort to locate her as a chronicler of contemporary Irish cultural and social experience, and to situate her experiences as a film professional within the wider culture of media production in Ireland. Co-founder of Dublin/New York-based production company Still Films and the Darklight Film Festival, Nicky Gogan is one of Ireland’s best-known female filmmakers and curator/programmers. Working across a range of media, she has made features, shorts and animation, but is best known for documentary work such as Seaview (2006), Pyjama Girls (2010), and Build Something Modern (2011).

Focusing primarily on her work as a producer, it applies a production studies approach in the vein of those highlighted by Banks, Conor & Mayer (2016), and “tak[ing] the lived realities of people involved in media production as the subjects for theorizing production culture” (Mayer, Banks & Caldwell, 2009, 4), interrogating the Irish film industry, and the place in it of female practitioners, through unpacking one instance of the operations of Irish production culture. This is especially important given that a) the work of producers remains under-considered in relation to production culture in general, and b) Irish Film Board statistics indicate that 55% of completed Irish productions during the period 2010-2015 had a female producer attached (Irish Film Board, 2015).

In addition, it considers the significance of non-Irish Film Board funding in facilitating the emergence of new filmmakers, the place of informal network-building in the kind of ‘portfolio’ career which characterises much employment in the sector, and the possibilities presented by collectivist filmmaking practices in mitigating gendered inequality.

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