Marion Bergin’s Eternal Quest for Magic
Marion Bergin, today, a director at The Banquet, has been creating from as early as she can remember. Her main set was the backyard of her mother’s house, and despite growing up in a city, she sees her earlier years as very country-influenced. “I was a bit nerdy, didn’t have lots of friends and the natural world was where I felt I belonged,” Marion remembers. The days passed, filled with making concoctions with smashed berries, doll dresses from rhubarb leaves and finding new expressions of her own creativity.
Later, in her teenage years, Marion started designing jewellery and clothing - a hobby that would prove crucial for the formative years of her career. “When I was about six, my mother remembers me being an absolute tyrant around what I was wearing,” she laughs. “Before I’d even get out of bed in the morning, I’d shout to her room, demanding to know what she was dressing me in that day.” So, with numerous school shoes-related meltdowns, Marion realised early on that aesthetics and fashion would be a huge part of her own self expression and identity.
Counter to her love of nature, art and colour, Marion ended up in an academically intense school, which harnessed incredible results but somewhat stumped her creatively. “It was quite traditional too - if you could draw still life then you were artistic, and I could, so I was. It wasn’t until my early twenties that I realised creativity is so much more than putting a pencil to paper to draw an ellipse.” Precisely her twenties were the time when Marion reverted back to understanding her earlier discoveries about the boundless possibilities for creative expression.
She then went on to pursue a degree in art history and Italian at Trinity College Dublin - nothing too practical for what she does today - but Marion was happy to walk away from the city knowing both research and discipline better, while also feeling more confident in her exploration of the abstract theories that come with colour and composition. “In all my creative pursuits today, there is a foundational level of image creation that is informed by my immersion in the history of art,” she says.
After university, Marion leaned on her deep love for fashion and aesthetics and even created her own label. The jump between that and directing happened through her styling and art directing music videos.“I was contributing and helping write treatments with a director I was working with, and I realised I had my own ideas that I wanted to develop,” Marion says. “I liked the buzz and the further extension of my creativity - the challenge of all the new moving parts. It was a natural progression of what I already knew.”
From her work as a fashion designer to her work today as a director, Marion is practically entirely self taught, and has always been driven by her ‘can do’ attitude. “I have always learned fast, and I’m OK with being really uncomfortable, so my usual answer is ‘Yep, I can do that’ and then I just figure it out later.” With craft running through her DNA, she is always on a mission to learn more about whatever she’s applying her skills to, whether that’s art directing, sound design or storytelling.
After her extensive experience with fashion, and following that, music videos, Marion was interested in working with people and diving deeper into more complex matters. During the time when these curiosities were sprouting, she also made her move back to Dublin, so she felt it only fitting she create something connected with the culture after spending 15 years in London. That is how ‘Saoirse’ - her Kinsale Shark winning documentary - came into existence.
“It was a repatriation film of sorts, and Dublin horse culture had this modern folkloric appeal,” Marion says. “Almost a make-believe world closed off to ‘outsiders’.” And while she didn’t grow up with horses, Marion herself felt the magnetic draw to the animal. “I remembered as a child seeing guys in tracksuits galloping horses bareback on the beach near where I lived, just fifteen minutes from Dublin city centre. I was mesmerised. I knew this culture still existed down the back alleys and on some estates in Dublin, so I wanted to find it and document it as I also knew it was diminishing due to gentrification.”
Marion knew she had to go slowly - the community proved wary of anyone with a camera due to past negative experience. “It’s also very male dominated,” she adds. “So, as a woman turning up in that world with the aim of making a documentary, it takes a while to gain trust.”
Armed with a 35mm camera, she started off with going to horse fairs, aiming to strike conversations and establish connections. And with that trust, her own confidence within the community grew. “It’s a step to go from the safety of fashion and music videos to rocking up at a random traveller’s site and knocking on someone’s front door, or heading off to an illegal horse race in the back of a random car. But, I put my trust in the people and the process, as they did with me.”
Shot over two days across eight locations with a ten-person cast, some of whom couldn’t read, Marion produced and directed ‘Saoirse’ on the fly with no permits. “When you’re galloping stallions down main streets of Dublin, you’re pretty sure you won’t get away with it, but we did - the garda even turned up at one point, but just sat back and watched the action.”
When working with the film after, Marion approached it very similarly to how she designed her collections from her fashion days - each shot was carefully planned, and quite often with references rooted in photography around the colour and framing. “I’m not a run and gun type,” she says. “It’s how I’m conditioned to work, and it means I’m going into my days shooting with a very clear vision of how the edit is going to play out.”
Being able to work on ‘Saoirse’ also allowed Marion to reconnect with nature, but this time explore it through her filmmaking. “Humanity has not had it easy in recent times,” she says. “I’m fascinated by AI and futurism and I also feel like with the rise of the machines, they’re already winning. As a species we’ve never had less time, been more stressed or confused, and we seem incapable of stepping away from an ‘always on’ way of living, so by all intents and purposes, the machines already have the upper hand and the power.”
She continues, “While this is terrifying, pretty heavy and quite shit really, when you think about it, we still have the natural world. It’s an ecosystem in which we have a natural place, somewhere that’s designed and scientifically proven to support and replenish us. In my work, I want to focus on and amplify topics that encourage us to connect with and respect these places for our own good, the good of each other, and for the good of the planet.”
The natural world is also where Marion finds another driving element to her work - aesthetics. Creating and consuming beauty is, to her, “what feeds the soul” and is always linked to whatever she does. “I also find intimacy in the natural world and love to connect with it through the lens.”
Doing that, Marion relates her own style with the worlds of art, aesthetics, folklore and the eternal quest to magic. “The pace and drive with which I work can sometimes drain the life and the joy out of things, so for me, finding ways to connect with wonder and awe informs a large part of what I do - if people feel somewhat enchanted by what I created, then I’m happy with that because I find the process enchanting myself.” To this end, she notes that two key themes tend to show up time and time again, these being horses and water.
In between these things, Marion’s artistic evolution is constant. Although she finds it difficult to pin her work down to a few words, she finally is set on these: “Beautiful, intimate and enchanting.”
Beauty, intimacy and magic are indeed found in all of her creations, and are explored through colours, themes and compositions she has toyed with all her life. So, with her visually-stimulating way of creating, Marion loves drifting through genres. “I am and always have been interested in intersections, and I feel there’s room for the cross pollination of lots of different disciplines in what I do. I love abstraction and less rigid approaches. I’m very interdisciplinary. In the end, I’m the happiest when in the middle of it. When I’m on set, under pressure, making decisions, in the moment.”
