I still remember sitting in my kitchen, half-listening to the radio, when Geraldine Carton’s voice came through on Liveline with Joe Duffy in April 2023. She was talking about her mad, brilliant idea: painting one hundred portraits of boobs. A wall of boobs. A riot of flesh, art, shame, pride, laughter, and survival.
And then Joe asked the question. That tired, sneering, lazy question: “What if a trans woman applied?”
Geraldine didn’t flinch. She didn’t throw anyone under the bus to make herself more palatable for daytime radio. She stood her ground, affirmed her inclusivity, and in that moment I knew this project wasn’t just about breasts as body parts – it was about who gets to belong, who gets to be seen, and who gets to us.
I messaged her that evening to say thank you. Thank you for seeing us, for seeing me. She replied with warmth, and before long I was nervously sending her a photo of my boobs for the project.
Not long after, director Nicola Leddy reached out. We had a Zoom call – she was (very) convincing and committed. At first the plan was simple: anonymous, clothed, talking heads. Nothing that would really rattle the bones of Irish conservatism. I agreed and filed it away with things that will never happen. But that was before Catalyst awarded the project a bursary, and before Invisible Thread Films signed on. Before the women gathered in Geraldine’s sitting room, Pride flags waving outside in the city, as we were stripping down and talking about our lives, our bodies, our rebellions.
It was disarmingly natural. The cameras, the nudity, the laughter – it became a kind of feminist coven. Geraldine painted while we spoke, and I found myself opening up about being an intersex trans woman, about my queer feminist activism, and about growing up in Catholic Ireland where bodies were sites of shame, silence, and violence.
Nicola’s crew was almost entirely women. They created a space where vulnerability wasn’t mined but honoured. Over those few days we filmed together, friendships formed as easily as sentences.
The film debuted at the Catalyst Film Festival in April 2025. By then, Geraldine had mounted her own exhibition – Sisters Not Twins – at City Assembly House in Dublin, where we gathered again, watching an early draft of the film between cups of tea and bursts of nervous laughter.
Since then, BOOBS has taken on a life of its own:
- 🏆 Winner at the Boyne Film Festival
- 🎬 Official Selection at Docs NYC – one of the top five doc festivals in the world, and Oscars-qualifying at that
- 🌴 Headed to the Newport Beach Film Festival in California
- 🎭 Accepted into the BAFTA-qualifying Norwich Film Festival, putting us in line for a possible BAFTA nomination
The Dublin premiere at the IFI during GAZE was a full-circle moment – a queer, feminist celebration in the heart of a city that once tried to smother us in silence.
So yes, BOOBS is about breasts. But it’s also about art as resistance. About visibility as survival. About refusing shame. About laughing at the absurdity of control, and about women – trans, intersex, cis, queer – daring to sit together, bare-chested, and say: here we are.
And isn’t that exactly what Ireland needs right now?
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2 responses
What a gorgeous account of this whole project, Sorcha. We were so lucky to have found you❤️
Beautifully written Sorcha!