Fermanagh filmmaker takes on Spike Lee and Renée Zellweger in LA festival
Animated short film Wildkind, based on Ciara Tinney’s book of the same name, is nominated at the HollyShorts Film Festival and will be screened at the famous TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood’s walk of fame.
Winners are announced at a gala, with several categories carrying Oscar-qualifying status.
Tinney, a former assistant director on hit fantasy drama Game Of Thrones, is travelling to LA with her husband and family for the screening.
She began writing her poem Wildkind after giving birth to her first daughter Adabelle, 11, and began to illustrate it when her daughters Fiadh Ros, eight, and Birdie Blue, six, were born.
The film adaptation, directed by John McDaid, had its world premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh on July 13, 2025.
Tinney said they had been “on a little bit of a fun tour around Ireland and through Europe” as the film was on the festival circuit, but the upcoming recognition is “one of the big ones”.
She said: “It is an Oscar gateway. There are other Oscar gateway ones that we have been selected for, but this is kind of a big one.
“It’s Oscar and Bafta qualifier, and so within our category, it’s hilarious kind of competition, we’re up against Spike Lee and Renée Zellweger, actually her film screens alongside ours.
“So it’s Renée Zellweger’s directorial debut alongside our director, who is John McDaid from Dog Ears Animation Studio in Derry, so we’re in great company, it’s a bit of a buzz.”
Tinney puts the film’s success down to it being a “universal bedtime story”.
She said: “We’ve just had interest there from a Mexican film festival who have heard about the film on the circuit and want us to apply.
“We have translated it already into French and Spanish, it was actually used as part of a French schools programme for a language learning tool, and then our Irish language version has been translated into working with Spanish subtitles as well, and so it just seems to resonate.
“I think it’s such a simple story, and the artistry, the look is really simple.
“It’s like a watercolour, and a black and white watercolour, very simple, fluid look, and I just think it’s that basic story that I think everybody’s craving.
“Our kids and ourselves, we’re living so much of our lives in a digital landscape, and everybody is craving to kind of rewild and just reconnect to nature, and that’s the basis of the story.
“It started as a poem that I had written for my three daughters, and a kind of… a mummy’s manifesto – how do I want to guide these little humans?
“That was kind of our north star… kindness and wildness, and that was what I thought – if we can stick to these two principles, we’ll be okay, and I just think that resonates.
“No matter what language, we always say every mummy puts her baby to bed in the same language. It’s just always going to be a language of hope for what’s to come for them.”
Tinney described the film as a “personal piece” that includes her own voice and those of her mother and daughters, as well as bird song captured from her garden.
She said it was “quite surreal” but “magic” to see that resonate internationally.
McDaid said Wildkind is “something totally new” for his company Dog Ears production.
“We’ve normally done commercial animation for broadcast,” he said. “So to create something small, just as a sort of a passion project, and then see it come to life across festivals, and to see the response that it’s had has been just a really joyful process.”
He said he brought Tinney’s book home and read it to his daughters and said it “resonated with all of them” and the “universality struck a chord with me straight away”.
McDaid described the film as a “very gentle, understated piece of animation and a piece of poetry” and expressed his shock at its worldwide success.
“We’re not pushing anything, there’s no special effects here, there’s no big hook that we think might kind of catch somebody’s attention,” he said.
“The fact that it has, and in so many high-profile festivals all across the world – I think it’s been selected for Seattle as well, which is the biggest in the USA and the third biggest in the world – for such a gentle little piece of storytelling is a gorgeous thing.
“So we just continue to kind of be amazed by the life that it’s taken on.”