Ailis O’Murchadha

So Turns the Wheel explores memory, transition, and constructed femininity through moving image and staged environments. Drawing from my experience growing up trans in Ireland, the film moves through abandoned interiors, dreamlike domestic spaces, and fragmented performances shaped by nostalgia, religious and institutional imagery, and cinematic archetypes of womanhood.
Influenced by classic film melodrama and psychological cinema, the work examines femininity as both performance and survival; something rehearsed, inherited, desired, and mourned. Through shifting identities and liminal spaces, the film reflects on the unstable boundary between memory and fantasy, asking how identity is formed within environments already haunted by absence, repetition, and expectation.