In 1993, maverick indie American film director, John Sayles, shot The Secret of Roan Inish in Rosbeg and the outlying area. Roan Inish was his ninth film and, unusually, the idea was not generated by him, but by his producer, Maggie Renzi.

The story is based on the 1957 children’s novella, ‘Secret of Ron Mor Skerry’ by Rosalie K. Fry, originally set in Scotland.  Roan Inish takes place just after World War II when 10-year-old Fiona (Jeni Courtney) moves to Donegal from Belfast to live with her grandparents (Mick Lally and Eileen Colgan) and her cousin Eamon (Richard Sheridan).  There, she becomes convinced that her baby brother, presumed dead, is in fact alive. She discovers that he has been taken away by the selkies, or seal people. When she starts on her quest to find him, she comes across a mysterious seal woman, played by Susan Lynch (who was joined in the cast by her brother, John Lynch).

Most film reviews commented on the beauty of the scenery and setting:

“The Secret of Roan Inish” is the first film directed by Mr. Sayles that could be described as visually rhapsodic. Photographed by Haskell Wexler on Ireland’s rugged northwestern seacoast, it is a cinematic tone poem in which man and nature, myth and reality flow together in a way that makes them ultimately indivisible. When the tiny Irish fishing community in which the characters eke out a bare existence isn’t battered by storms, it is wrapped in mist. To the people who live there, the ocean’s shifting currents and the movements of the seals who teem along the shoreline have portentous meanings. The myths and fables they hand down are woven out of fog, wildflowers and sealskin. (New York Times)