Bono and co. enlisted Irish director Aoife McArdle to visually bring to life the U2 track “Every Breaking Wave” with a Somesuch-produced short film of the same name, which made its premiere on The Creators Project this week.  The film follows the Romeo and Juliet-style romance between two teenaged punks, one Catholic and one Protestant, amidst the inescapable violence of early-1980’s Belfast.

The result is a heartbreaking visual epic that’s garnered praise from the most respected of McArdle’s filmmaking peers. Spike Jonze said of the piece, “I had never seen anything by Aoife before but was really taken with this film. She captured that feeling and size of life of being a teenager and of first love so well. She drifts between the reality of friends and first love into fantasy so effortlessly and romantically. It’s a perfect little gem of a romance movie.”

After watching it, Anonymous Content director Alejandro González Iñárritu remarked, “The piece is full of sound and fury. It contains all that a young artist’s work should: a lot of things to say and feel, said with fucking guts, vision and ambition. There is no fear in McArdle’s piece but plenty of humanity; shot and expressed with poetry without betraying the truth.”