Private Project

GOLDEN DELICIOUS

Golden Delicious explores a kind of quantum entanglement between past and present. In a 1970s Polish orchard, a man picks and tastes an apple; decades later, the filmmaker repeats his gestures. An apple thrown through the camera lens seems to cross time, caught in another era—a small, impossible act that blurs memory, matter and the order of time.

  • Mairéad McClean
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Experimental
  • Runtime:
    3 minutes 14 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    September 30, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    500 GBP
  • Country of Origin:
    Poland, United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Shooting Format:
    16mm
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • New Museum of Modern Art Warsaw
    Warsaw
    Poland
    September 1, 2025
    Polish Premiere
  • Swedenborg Film Festival
    London
    United Kingdom
    December 6, 2026
    National Premiere
    Official selection
Director Biography - Mairéad McClean

Born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, Mairead McClean is a visual artist working across film, video, sound, and photography. Her practice incorporates archival and found footage, televisual material, filmed performance and voice to examine how memory, history and state control are encoded in moving image. Over the past 25 years, McClean has received numerous awards for her work, which is held in major public collections and has been exhibited internationally.

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Director Statement

Golden Delicious began with a simple recognition: watching a man in a 1970's Polish home movie pick and taste apples, I realised his gesture was something I could repeat. Rather than treating the archive as a fixed record, I approached it as a space I could enter—responding in the present, beneath apple trees in London.
The apple becomes a point of exchange. It is held, bitten, absorbed—carrying sensory and historical weight. Its movement between past and present suggests a quiet disruption of linear time, where gestures can be received and answered across decades.
Sound is central to this encounter. Through foley, echo and interference, I place myself within the image, as if listening from inside the archive rather than observing it from a distance.
Part of the Breath Memory (Pamięć Oddechu) series, the film proposes that the past is not fixed, but open—waiting for contact, for reply.