This is Cleona and Colm’s fifth time in America since last October, squeezed between other trips abroad to international film festivals.

“We felt like we had to get out there in the world and talk about the film, meet people and shout as much about our film as we could,” Cleona says. “The fact that the two of us are in it, it just makes it so much easier. It makes it harder with the kids” — their sons, Diolun (6) and Rian (4) — “and for us both to get away. But it makes it easier in so far as we understand completely what’s required to make a success of the film. It’s amazing to be on this extraordinary journey together.”

An Cailín Ciúin has been on a sensational march: from becoming the first Irish-language feature film to be showcased and win an award at the Berlin Film Festival to winning seven Iftas last year to receiving two Bafta nominations to becoming the first Irish-language feature film to be nominated for the Oscars in the Best International Feature Film category.

Last month, Baftas host Richard E Grant said: “Everyone here started with one lucky break.” This chimes with Cleona’s belief that they have been “so lucky” with how so much came together to make this film happen, even rewinding to when they first met working on the TG4 docudrama Ceart agus Coir.

I must admit to not being an impartial observer of their journey. Cleona has been one of my best friends for the last 20 years since we first worked together in Newstalk. Cleona read the news and I read the sport. She used to handle compiling bulletins and the pressure of breaking stories like it was second nature. One year she did the Women’s Mini Marathon for fun. A few years later, she ran the main Dublin Marathon under four hours. Luck doesn’t come into it when someone is as innately determined, hard-working and passionate as she is.

Cleona recalls the prescient final lines of the speech she gave on her wedding day to Colm nearly eight years ago when she said they might make a film together someday. “Colm said he was a bit surprised when he heard me say that because we never spoke about it,” she says. “That was 2015, but maybe subconsciously, I felt we would do something big. It’s mad to think that five years after, we were actually making a movie.”

Working on their first feature film together as producer and director, they were like “ships in the night”, driving separately to shoots. They would catch up with each other on the phone.

“It’s lovely because there’s complete transparency between us about everything that’s going on. We always have each other’s backs. There are stressful things happening, but you always have each other. I remember another producer saying to me that the role of a producer can be the loneliest job because you’re kind of apart from everybody else. Whereas it’s different with Colm and I. We always have each other to talk through problems and make decisions together.”

It was Cleona who first saw Catherine Clinch’s audition for the role of Cáit in May 2020. Covid ended in-person auditions so they had to be sent in by tape. They had been searching for Cáit for nearly seven months by that stage. Cleona was home one Friday evening when she looked at Catherine’s tape. She immediately rang Colm. They knew they had found their “quiet girl”.

“Catherine, she was our shining light. It’s amazing the performance that she gave every day. She would regularly get a round of applause at the end of the day. She carried the whole film. We always had Carrie Crowley in mind for the lead role of Eibhlín. But it took us some time to find Andrew Bennett, who plays Seán, as we didn’t realise he had Irish at first, but then we brought the three of them together. It was like we had found our holy trinity.”

There is a personal poignancy to An Cailín Ciúin being a father-daughter story. The film is dedicated to Cleona’s dad, Jim, who died in July 2019. She felt his spirit during the making of the film a year later.

The plan wasn’t to shoot the film in Co Meath, where she is from. They looked at locations in Wicklow and Kildare, but Cleona and Colm came across an old farmhouse, whose owner had died, near Summerhill, Co Meath.

When they visited, she saw a funeral brochure on the table. “It was the same funeral director that had directed my dad’s funeral a year previously. It gave me a kind of light-bulb moment: I’ll just ring Willie Ryan — who knows houses better than a funeral director? I mentioned one house that our location manager had brought us to that we liked. And Willie said, ‘Well, you know there’s a brother of that farmer, he lives in the old family home a few miles up the road that’s way off the beaten track. You should go up there and have a look at that house’.”

It was with thanks to Willie that they discovered the farmhouse that would feature the final scene of Cáit running down the lane. They scouted hard in that area and found the Kinsella house, with its tree-lined avenue and cattle-grid at the entrance, just like in Keegan’s story.

“I always think that it was just a miracle that we found that location,” Cleona says. “People have spoken about the film’s authenticity, and I think the locations really gave it that authentic feel, like we were stepping into the story.

“It’s apt also that the film focuses on a father-daughter relationship because I was so close to my Dad and that’s why I think it was meant to be. I’m happy he knew we got the green light for the film before he died and he would be so proud knowing his name is now appearing in cinemas all over the world.”

Cleona was born in Reading and her parents moved back to Ireland and settled near Trim when she was four. She and her older sister Sinéad used to be called ‘the English girls’ in school because of their accents.

She loved the Irish language since she was a child and her and Colm are now raising their sons as Gaeilge. Seeing how An Cailín Ciúin has revitalised the language, with stars like Paul Mescal speaking it on the red carpet at the Baftas, gives her hope people will reconnect with it.

“I hope in some small way it’s helping the language or helping the movement to preserve the language. Like making it part of mainstream culture. Anecdotally, we’ve heard from people that they’re re-examining their relationship with the language and re-engaging with it in some way.”

Cleona will wear a dress by Irish designer Caterina Coyne from Galway at the Oscars when a green wave will descend on Hollywood. Cleona’s family — her mother Ellen, sister Sinéad and brother Kieran, and their families and Colm’s father — will be there for Oscars week.

Cleona doesn’t want this time to end, but just like the film and its unforgettable final scene, some things stay with you forever.

“When it was released in cinemas, people would just have this outpouring of emotion and have this impulse to share their response to the film on social media. It feels like it has been cathartic for people.

“Although the plot itself is quite simple, there is quite a lot of tension in the film... When the film reaches its climax at the end, audiences tend to let go of that tension they’ve been holding throughout the film.”

In everyday life, Cleona has always placed huge value on connection and connecting with people. It is also this quiet strength, allied to the power of cast and crew, that has helped make An Cailín Ciúin the wonderful, emotional epic that it is.