IN THE SPOTLIGHT- Liam Lacey at Cannes

"I'd read the book and then I got the script after. I was looking for any corny lines and then I finished it and there weren't any corny lines, and I said to myself 'Well, that's a good sign.'"

The speaker is 19-year-old Elaine Cassidy, the Irish teenager who stars in Canadian director Atom Egoyan's new film, Felicia's Journey. The place is a shady courtyard of the Hotel Residence, where plastic tables of journalists, publicists with clipboards and walkie-talkies mill about, a relatively quiet corner away from the bustle of the main festival.

Cassidy, who comes from a small town in County Wicklow, is direct, funny and bouncier than a houseful of spaniels, and is obviously enjoying talking to a group of international journalists for the first time in her life (although she has been acting since age 5, "since I knew what the word meant." One of her main challenges, she says, was the tears.

"I'm not a cryer. Even at really sad movies, I'll have a lump in my throat and I'll be hurting, and I won't let the tears come. Before I shot the scene where I cried, I hadn't cried in three years since my dog died. I guess I haven't had too bad a life. So, I started thinking about my dog and making my eyes stay open, like you're looking far away so they started to sting. Between the two of them, I got some tears. The second time was a lot easier."

Cassidy plays a girl whose father is a rigid Irish patriot, who still considers the English as the enemy. As for her own view on such issues, she confesses to finding them mystifying. "All this talk about 1916 rising and the GPO. The General Post Office occupied by Irish rebels in a failed rebellion didn't mean anything to me. I liked Renaissance history a lot; I thought Irish history was boring- all those counties to remember. Because I didn't want my character saying words she didn't understand, I had to borrow my younger cousin's history book and I started reading it and feeling very Irish. I never particularly wanted to feel that way, so I thought, 'Okay. Feel that way until you're through with the role.'"

Although she's the only actress in her family (she has two sisters), Cassidy says she has some show business heritage. "My grandfather on my father's side was a great one for sing-alongs. He's probably the only man who ever started a sing-along on an airplane. He even got one going when he was in hospital."

Near the end of Felicia's Journey, as with The Sweet Hereafter, there are moments that, in tone, suggest prayers for the dead. The theme of lost communities resonates in both films, and as Egoyan acknowledged yesterday, Felicia's Journey holds echoes of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks, an atrocity compounded by the recurrent attempts to deny it. […]

Photo by RHONDA GALBRAITH/Associated Press