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Coincidences Happen
Ten years after the inception of the NIFTC, and with its largest motion picture to date waiting in the wings, Michael Open casts an eye over the state of film production in Northern Ireland.
Coincidences happen. City of Ember – the largest film to be made in Northern Ireland – is scheduled to start shooting in early July of this year; ten years, almost to the day, since the Northern Ireland Film & Television Commission (NIFTC) opened for business (as Northern Ireland Film Commission) in 1997. The dark children’s fantasy is based on the successful book by Jeanne DuPrau and is set in a dying city where light is absent, save for giant floodlights powered by failing generators. It falls to two unlikely children to search for the forbidden ‘unknown regions’ to try to save the city. The film will be entirely shot in Northern Ireland, largely in the giant ‘Paint Shop’ facility in the Titanic Quarter of Belfast. British-born Gil Kenan (he of Monster House) will direct, with Tom Hanks producing for Playtone and Walden Media.
There is also, perhaps, a little irony here. A sentence containing the words ‘Northern Ireland’ and ‘start shooting’ conjures up images for most of the world’s population which are far removed from filmmaking, and there were plenty of buildings in Belfast city that were reduced to embers. The Province today, however, has, to all intents and purposes, left the Troubles behind and, with the latest political settlement seemingly done and dusted, the ensuing political stalemate as well.
It was within that environment of political stalemate that the NIFTC, Northern Ireland’s official government-funded film agency for the region, was founded. The organisation emerged from a voluntary body, the Northern Ireland Film Council, which grew from the initiative of Manfred Hattendorff, a young German visitor to the Province, in the late ‘80s. For much of its existence the NIFTC was headed by Richard Taylor, who put in place the organisation’s structure and headed it an industry-friendly direction. The Film Commission, as it was then, had scant resources – just a £0.5m fund for development. Over the following five years, however, by showing ability to lever funds up by several multiples using a variety of funding sources, the Commission established its entrepreneurial credentials. That enabled, initially, a small production fund (of £0.5m) to be added in 1999, followed by the delegation of UK Lottery Funds for Northern Ireland film production in 2001.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 116.
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