Goretti (Emer McCourt) and her friends are four happy-go-lucky 15-year-olds living in the Catholic ghettos of the Bogside and Creggan estates in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1984. When Goretti meets Ciarán (Michael Liebmann) at an Irish language class, a romance begins. But the local political climate is dominated by the ‘supergrass’ (informer) trials and when Ciarán is suddenly arrested Goretti discovers that her troubles have just started. The film explores Irish attitudes to sexuality at a time when religion was an important foundation of social behaviour in Ireland. The film introduces the young Sinéad O’Connor who also wrote the musical score. It is notable that Harkin’s directorial debut, which won several Irish and international awards, focussed on a young woman dealing with a crisis pregnancy, an issue she would revisit in her 2024 feature documentary Stolen.

The film is available in a 2025 restoration, which has been created from original 16mm elements, by the IFI Irish Film Archive for IFI’s Digital Restoration Project funded by Screen Ireland | Fís Éireann and supported by A Season of Classic Films an initiative of ACE – Association des Cinémathèques Européennes supported by the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme.

Notes by Sunniva O’Flynn