Gillian Morrison RIP

Gillian's sudden and shocking death last Sunday, while still in her early thirties, can't have left anyone who was involved in the Cork film scene in the middle years of this decade without a very personal, particular sense of loss...

Gillian was not the sort of person who passed through people's lives unnoticed.

To me, she was a friend, a workmate at Cork Film Centre, a onetime flatmate. As a promising young producer, she was crucially involved in two of my films and instrumental in obtaining the funding to make Point of Departure...

But ask almost anyone who was around in those days, trying to make films in this town, and you'll discover evidence of her infinite helpfulness, of her belief in the possibility of a film community developing and thriving here.

Yet that was only one aspect of her visceral kindness and generosity. She had a deep, innate and irreplaceable emotional understanding of human frailty and goodness. And it is a rare heart that is big enough to remain at once so open and so lucid.

That's the Gillian I knew.