“At a time when most people were being pushed apart, we were pushed together”, so said Irish filmmaker, Michael David McKernan, of his somewhat unexpected, yet wholeheartedly welcome, relationship with fellow movie-creator Mimi Wilcox. New York Irish Arts’ contributor Michael Fitzpatrick reviews their story, in McKernan’s short film; ‘How to Fall in Love in a Pandemic’, which featured at the recent Tribeca Film Festival.
How it’s New York: This short screened at the Tribeca Film Festival
How it’s Irish: It was directed, produced and edited by Dunboyne, County Meath-based Michael David McKernan.
There are things we can do, and times we can do them. For the past sixteen months or so, the things we do, became somewhat limited. So it was, is even, an era where we’d make the most of what we had, and continue to have it, as long as we could. Or something. We’d take care of the good things anyway, the bad ones, well, they’d get worse, if we focused too hard. The good ones though, well, that’s a different story. A story the likes of Michael David McKernan can tell superbly.
In ‘How to Fall in Love in a Pandemic’, Irish director McKernan and noted filmmaker, the US-based Mimi Wilcox, made the most of things, and more.
While many Zoomed, home-schooled, worked out a little too often, or not nearly enough, some, like McKernan and Wilcox, made movies. About themselves, and made the extraordinary seem, well, ordinary. Almost.
Having chatted on a dating app, the pair met up in Chicago, while attending that city’s acclaimed film festival, back in 2020. They hit it off, and, coming off a bad break-up, and out for a change of scenery, some weeks later, Wilcox chose to fly to Ireland on a whim, to see McKernan, and, well, to see where things went.
Where they went, was somewhere nobody could possibly have imagined. Where she didn’t go, was back home. Not right away anyway.
March 2020 has a habit of coming up in conversations where international travel is concerned. Within days of her arrival in Ireland, whispers of a mystery ‘virus’, turned to thunderous shouting, and in despair, she listened to Leo Varadkar, the country’s former Taoiseach and current Tanaiste (head of government and deputy head of government respectively) announce that there would be no flights in or out of Ireland for the foreseeable future, due to the by then not fully-understood effects of the mysterious Coronavirus.
What followed, was days, weeks, of uncertainty, and hours and hours, of footage. What started as something of a video diary, with the pair discussing their unusual situation, turned into an emotional roller-coaster, for the pair of them, as the two filmmakers ventured forward and tried for clarity in an uncertain time.
Wilcox moved into McKernan’s Dunboyne home, albeit temporarily, until some kind of normalcy began reigning once more, whenever that would be, where she shared the filmmaker’s house, with him and his dog, Myla.
Thrown together, not unwillingly, but unexpectedly, the pair’s experience, is anything but smug. They are both very much aware of the extraordinary stresses that so many around them experienced, and their natural affection for one another was not without its initial incidents of guilt and awkwardness.
Shot mostly on their cellphones, there are intimate, tender moments indoors, while outside, sitting in the car, they speak out, voicing their feelings, with frustration and emotions often overflowing before the camera’s lens.
It’s a short movie, not a typical romantic tale, but one that will leave us wondering and perhaps questioning, ourselves and our pandemic situations, for even McKernan, when asked about the story, and how it moved forward, said; ‘I don’t know where the rest of the story is’.
