Peter Lonsdale looks at Dolores Rice’s powerful short Fat.
Actor and filmmaker Dolores Rice is a meteoric Irish talent, and it shows immediately. Her short film Fat tells a story about shame and its long shadow, a single storyline distilled to its purest form, presented with an almost literary use of filmic devices. The overall effect, particularly after an inevitable rewatch, is of a Claire Keegan novella in all its concision and emotional heft.
We meet Maeve (Liz Fitzgibbon) as she is examined by her doctor. The room is joyless, with drab, desaturated colours and droning medical advice. Before she receives her prescription for weight-loss jabs, she bolts out in an apparent anxiety attack. Later, flashbacks and deep-fat fryers warn us that food is not simply a crutch for Maeve, and that there is more than body fat weighing her down. In less than 17 minutes, we follow a story of her early gregariousness and talent derailed by childhood sexual abuse, followed by a lifelong maladaptive coping mechanism. After the triggering opening scene, Maeve develops two new obsessions: one constructive and one potentially very destructive indeed. It all leads to a powerful resolution; the viewer is kept in increasing tension until an unexpected end.
The power of the writing is no surprise given Rice’s credentials. She’s written for Netflix, been funded by the Arts Council several times, and has been optioned by Hell’s Kitchen Productions, Element Pictures, Sleeper Films, and Imagination. But Fat benefits from even more than that. Produced with Ashore Productions and Alice Productions, it is a slickly made piece. We are guided through the flashback sequences by Tony Kent’s admirably invisible editing, as well as through clever cues such as Natalia Witkowska’s colouring, which contrasts the warmth of memory with an initially bleak present.
What makes the brief running time so capacious is that much of the storytelling is visual, an exercise in show-don’t-tell. In good part, this is achieved by Liz Fitzgibbon’s skilful central performance, in which she conveys depths of pain and strength beneath the traumatised numbness and learned invisibility of the oldest incarnation of Maeve. Her early promise was long ago subsumed by eating to oblivion, which is captured on screen by emerging talent Willow McCarthy. The fat is a millstone around her neck at the start of the film, an eloquent visual representation of the secret she’s been carrying since she was around ten. The repeated image of tears hitting a child’s crayon drawing is deeply heart-rending.
At the time of writing, Fat has screened at some serious industry festivals, such as Dances With Films, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and the Galway Film Fleadh (where Fitzgibbon earned a Bingham Ray New Talent Award nomination). And now, work is already underway to adapt the short into a full-length feature. Get to it while you can: this is a film to boast about having seen.
On 22nd October 2026, the film is being formally presented to the Minister for Justice by the organisation One In Four.
