A Want in Her is one of the most critically acclaimed British-Irish documentaries of recent years — a radically personal work in which director Myrid Carten excavates the ruins of her own family history to confront alcoholism, inherited trauma and the weight of generational fate.
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When her mother, Nuala, disappears, Carten turns the camera on her own life and begins a search that gradually transforms into a layered, collage-like act of self-examination. Home videos, phone recordings, archival material and present-day confrontations are interwoven into a fractured yet emotionally coherent narrative.
The film is not merely a chronicle of addiction or mental breakdown. It probes how trauma is transmitted across generations and how love can become both an obligation and a survival mechanism carried as a burden. Carten refuses the position of detached observer: her anger, shame, guilt and devotion are all present on screen. The structure mirrors the cyclical nature of addiction itself — looping, interrupted, revisited — rather than unfolding in linear progression.
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Despite its raw emotional honesty, the film is not without tenderness or humour. Even in its darkest moments, it reveals the fragile, persistent bond between mother and daughter. The camera becomes at once witness, mourner and instrument of re-meaning — an attempt to reshape the family archive into something survivable.

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Myrid Carten is an Irish visual artist and filmmaker whose work operates at the intersection of personal archive and documentary practice. Her projects frequently explore family memory, inherited trauma and female identity, often employing performative and experimental strategies.
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A Want in Her is her debut feature-length film, constructed from the materials of her own life into a work of radical self-exposure. Carten does not seek objectivity; instead, she foregrounds the filmmaking process itself, allowing the camera to function simultaneously as witness, tool and emotional conduit.
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The film has been widely recognised as one of the strongest documentary debuts of recent years, praised for its ability to transform deeply personal trauma into rigorous aesthetic form without diminishing its emotional intensity.

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Director: Myrid Carten
Cast: Myrid Carten, Nuala
Cinematography: Myrid Carten, Donna Wade, Seán Mullan
Screenwriter: Myrid Carten
Producer: Kat Mansoor, Róisín Geraghty, Tadhg O’Sullivan, Eline van Wees
Editor: Karen Harley
Music: Clarice Jensen
Sound Design: Morgan Muse
Distributor: -
Colour: colour
Run time: 81 mins

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