Saturday Boy
Best short, Harbour Light Film Festival 2025. Official selection, Nocturne Shorts Week 2026. Official selection, Ridgeline Film Festival 2026.
The programmer's note
A staff pick because of the timing. Brannigan writes teenagers who talk too fast and then land on the one true thing, and he stages the shop so you always know where the door is, which is most of the comedy. Watch the second customer, the man returning the underlay. He is on screen for ninety seconds and the whole economy of the film is in his shoes. Fourteen minutes. We put it in a shorts programme in April and it played twice.
The film
Cormac Dunne is fifteen and works Saturdays at Dunne Floorcoverings on the Naas Road, where his uncle Ger pays him twenty euro and lunch. The job is mostly sweeping. This Saturday Ger hands him a price gun, points at a roll of oatmeal Berber standing in the corner like a suspect, says it needs to be gone by six, and leaves. What follows is a shop-floor farce played almost entirely straight. A couple come in wanting the stairs done. A man returns an underlay he has obviously used. The woman from the tile place next door keeps looking through the window with an expression Cormac cannot read. Brannigan lets his lead solve the day with the tools a fifteen-year-old actually has, which are overconfidence, a memorised script and a phone he is not supposed to use at work. Every customer is a small closed system with its own rules, and the film is very funny about how quickly a boy learns to read them. The last shot rearranges what the carpet was for.
