Liam comes home with new film Lost and Found

‘Money no object’ might well have been Liam Ó Mochain’s motto as he set about making his latest film, Lost & Found, which is currently showing in the Eye Cinema. It’s not that he had limitless supplies of cash – the contrary, in fact – but he worked out a way of shooting it over a period of five years, on a budget, in a way that allowed him to finance it himself. It’s a film of seven interconnecting stories set in and around the Lost and Found office of an Irish train station and was mostly shot in Portarlington. All the stories are inspired by true stories, and they share a theme of something lost or found and characters that come in and out of each other’s lives. The fact that it was self-financed is a fair achievement, especially when the cast includes some of Ireland’s finest actors such as Norma Sheahan (The Clinic and Moone Boy), Liam Carney (Red Rock), Aobhin Garrihy (The Fall) and Sean Arms of the comedy trio, Foil Arms and Hogg as well as Galway’s own Séamus Hughes (An Klondike). Liam, who is from Connemara, also appears, as well as having written, financed and directed it. So, you’d expect a high-flier. But when he arrives in the Connacht Tribune office, fresh off the train from Dublin, ahead of a screening and Q&A in the Eye with Seamus, he’s utterly unassuming. Driven, alright, but no airs and graces. It’s just that what religion is to other people, film-making is to him, he says with a laugh over coffee in a nearby café. Liam was reared in Camus and went to the vocational school in Rosmuc, before studying Business in the RTC. Taking that course was just a means of staying in Galway, he says, but his passion lay elsewhere. It was 1991 and Galway Youth Theatre had just been set up, so he enrolled alongside people like Tommy Tiernan, now a comedian, Alice Mary Higgins, now a senator, and Síle Nic Chonaonaigh, now a broadcaster and TV presenter. He was also involved with the Irish language National Youth Theatre and set up a drama society in the RTC.