Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story (F/F)

Dir. Sinéad O'Shea | Ireland | United Kingdom | 99 min | 2024

When author Edna O’Brien, then a young unpublished novelist, described a tar road as “blue”, her partner Ernest Gébler was enraged, insisting that a road could never be blue. But as this tenderly empathetic documentary clearly shows, on a hot summer day a road can indeed be blue, its shimmering surface reflecting the sky above. It was just a sentence but Gébler’s rage continued to burn as the fiercely intelligent Edna became increasingly successful as an author, quickly surpassing his own fame, and becoming a darling of the mid-20th century cultural and literary scenes. Although O’Brien eventually left the embittered Gébler, the shadow of male violence that was so incensed by her impulse to write continued to be a theme in the now-celebrated author’s life. Centred around a rich archive of period interviews and a conversation with O’Brien in 2024, shortly before her death, Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is a siren song to the act of writing and its transportative powers, for both writers and readers.