Round up your best girlfriends and book a date now to see The Bright Side, a beautiful, funny and very moving new Irish film, staring a brilliant Gemma-Leah Deveraux alongside stellar performances by our most talented actresses with a dollop of Tom Vaughan Lawlor on the side. Director Ruth Meehan talks to Carissa Casey about this very personal story.

On paper, it sounds pretty miserable. Thirty something depressive gets breast cancer and undergoes chemo with a group of other women. But a combination of razor sharp writing, the best of Irish acting talent, an emotionally engaging story and zinger one liners makes The Bright Side one of the must-see movies of this year. This is a movie written by Irish women, directed by an Irish woman, staring Irish women, about Irish women getting on with the all dreadful and wonderful things life throws at us. 

At its heart, The Bright Side is a story about friendship and love, and how ultimately that’s what really matters.

For director Ruth Meehan it was a very personal journey, which started a few years ago when she found herself sitting in an airport alone on New Year’s Eve en route to India. A year earlier her sister had died of cancer. “I was one of the ‘copers’ in the family and I realised I need to get away, far far away. I was kind of running away,” she admits. Feeling slightly lost, she wandered into a bookshop and came across a copy of I’ve got cancer, what’s your excuse by an old college acquaintance Anne Gildea. “I picked it up and I guess I just really loved the tone of it. I was struck by the honesty and the irreverence. My sister, in particular, had a very dark sense of humour and she would have loved it. Anne had been through breast cancer, but more than that she had been really honest about where she was mentally, her suicidal ideation and faithlessness in life when she got the diagnosis.”

Two things jumped out at her. “One was the sentence Ann had used: ‘I have been sexually promiscuous and emotionally celibate my entire life’. The other was a throwaway line about a group called Casting for Recovery, where people go fly fishing in recovery. Maybe it was a joke but I got a very strong image in my mind of women together at a lake, fly-fishing in recovery. Those two things tonally – the honesty and the rawness of the way Ann was thinking and that image by the lake, made me feel like there was the basis of a great character.”

After landing in Goa, she contacted Anne to see if the two could collaborate on developing a movie together. They were joined by Jean Pasley and The Bright Side was born. “The development process was really enjoyable,” says Ruth. “From the start I felt that the idea came to me; the story came to me. It wasn’t mine as such. It felt like it had its own character. Even though I directed it, I felt I was more a midwife than a director, helping something come through. Just trying to mind it, find out what’s best for it, let it attract what it needs, keep faith in it.”

Kate, the central character of the Bright Side, is fictitious, she explains. The starting point was Anne’s book but Kate quickly began to have a life of her own. A stand-up comedian who, between brutally honest gigs, self-medicates with painkillers and one-night stands, she’s one of those infuriating characters you want to scream at and hug at the same time. Her father was alcoholic, her mother emotionally disengaged, all she has in life is her brother and her scathing wit. And then she’s diagnosed with breast cancer.

Gemma-Leah Deveraux puts in an amazing performance as Kate, allowing us to glimpse Kate’s vulnerability beneath the spikey casing. As Ruth says, Gemma-Leah gave “her heart and soul and hair to make it happen”. 

At chemotherapy she meets four other Irish women, as good a cross-section of modern Ireland as it’s possible to get. Barbara Brennan plays Róisín, a kindly older woman with a deep faith in God. Derbhle Crotty is superb as Helen, a well-to-do house-wife who’s taken to Buddhist beliefs. Karen Egan is Fiona, an openly gay woman with a zest for life. But it’s Siobhán Cullen’s Tracy, a working-class girl, far too young to be struggling with cancer, that proves to be more than a match for Kate, who becomes in many ways the emotional heart of the film. Her screaming matches with Kate are as vicious and cruel as their bond is, eventually, unshakeable.

Tom Vaughan-Lawlor plays an anti-Nidge, a gentle, thoughtful pharmacist who volunteers at Casting for Recovery, teaching women recovering from breast cancer to fly fish (we learn that the casting action is good for the lymph nodes). He’s the love interest for Kate, a woman who, at the start, is proudly disinterested in love.

There’s also a brief but very memorable appearance of Philippa Dunne, (Anne in Motherland, Geraldine Devlin in Derry Girls). She plays the kind of receptionist we’ve pretty much all met, to great comic effect, bouncing of Gemma-Leah and Siobhan brilliantly. 

“There are no small parts in a film,” says Ruth. Every character has to arrive fully formed. Sometimes it’s harder for an actor who’s not there all the time to slot into a role and inhabit that, like they live there.”  

While the characters are all fictitious, they feel real. “Even though it isn’t autobiographical”, says Ruth, “it is coming out of my own experience of loss and grief.”

“There’s an emotional truth going through it that I feel. The emotion is autobiographical. How you negotiate grief and pain and trauma?”

“The stand-up and some of the dialogue and ideas come out of Ann’s book. Her material was very important, it was the housing if you like. But it was a real synthesis of all of our experiences and nobody’s at the same thing. It is its own thing.”

The film’s release was suspended because of the pandemic, which Ruth acknowledges as very difficult. She was keen to see the audience reaction. Cancer is not usually a subject for humour and, as she points out, it’s “dangerous to deal with this material, especially irreverently.”

But it premiered online at the Cork Film Festival and won the audience award. It also won an award at the Sonoma International Film Festival in the US. It releases at theatres in Ireland on 20 August and that will mark the first time Ruth or any of those involved in the film will be able to see it in a cinema with other people. 

It will be worth the wait, to see Irish women portrayed by Irish women. “It’s that sense of having a female perspective expressed,” says Ruth. “To be able to have those stories. They’re not better or worse they’re just different.”

“Maybe people will identify with the story because of what we’ve gone through this past year, the huge value we bring to each other during dark times.”

“And there’s the contradictions of humour. In the dark times humour can help you. But also sometimes you need to stop laughing and feel. Ultimately this is the story of the power of female friendship.” 

The Bright Side is on release in cinemas from August 20.