AWARD-winning West Belfast filmmaker Seán Murray will see his first feature drama headlining Belfast Film Festival.
'Lost City' was written and directed by Seán and features a stellar cast including Martin McCann, Jade O'Neill and Stephen Rea.
McCann stars as Paul, a boxer whose life is getting back on track when he starts dating a woman with a troubled past. When her violent ex-boyfriend, a notorious Limerick gangster, follows her to Belfast, Paul finds himself caught up in a crime underworld in order to protect the woman he loves.
Seán said the idea for the film has been in the pipeline for a while, and developed from a previous drama project.
"I'd always had the idea for a feature from Fractured City, a short that I'd made with Martin McCann and Ciaran McCourt, both of whom are in Lost City. Two years ago I decided to put pen to paper and start writing a script."
Seán is well-known for high quality documentaries, including Unquiet Graves and Killing Kelly, but he said that the transition into directing drama was smoother than expected.
"For me it was a smooth transition. My type of narrative storytelling is grounded in social realism.
"I've produced a lot of dramas, and always been about dramas. For me drama is an easier format. Documentary takes its own shape. With drama, you have a script, although it changes, you stick to what you need to do and it takes you from there.
"Drama has its difficulties in certain areas. You're dealing with a lot more people, but for me drama is an easier format."
Despite the transition, Seán said that the project did not come without its challenges. Moving from working with a tight team on documentaries to managing bigger personalities proved difficult at times, as did crafting the final script.
"Scriptwriting is a funny thing. It's different from documentary. With scriptwriting there are too many cooks. The greatest difficulty is disseminating the good idea from the bad ideas. You need to stay on course with your own vision
"A lot of the drama productions I worked on, although I was the producer, I was kind of managing people," he continued.
"The greatest difficulty with drama is you're having to deal with personalities. Once you're able to navigate personalities then things run smoothly.
"You have different departments who don't get along sometimes. You always have challenges with people. You always have challenges with egos. If you can navigate that and if you're a good people person then directing comes easy."
GRITTY: Lost City will premiere at Belfast Film Festival
Seán said he managed to assemble "the exact people" that he wanted for the film's cast, and he believes that some of the performances from his actors will catapult them to stardom.
"I think this film has a lot of great performances. It's a film of breakthrough actors also. There are actors there who are really going to take off after this film," he said.
Belfast has been well-featured on the screen – both big and small – in recent years, but the West Belfast man believes that this gritty drama will give audiences a new perspective on life in the city.
"I think this is the first time that we've had gritty drama here. This is a unique cinematic representation – warts and all – of the city we're all from. It's never been done before. It's never mashed those two genres – a dark love story with a criminal underworld story – before. Threaded all through that is the politics of the north.
"This hasn't been done before. It's a very different representation than what we're used to seeing in the cinema. There are a number of challenging themes in this film which might make some people uncomfortable. I'm looking forward to seeing how the audience react to it."
As a proud Belfast native, for Seán the Belfast Film Festival has always been a goal. He is someone who "isn't worried about Oscars", and places great value in the support he has received from the festival throughout his career.
"It's always been an ambition of mine to headline Belfast Film Festival. It's the jewel in the crown of filmmaking here in the north, and in Ireland in general.
"It's a proud moment for me to be able to headline and for the team at Belfast Film Festival to have faith in the film.
"It doesn't get bigger than this for me. This gritty filmmaking is about the society we live in, and I'm vindicated by about how audiences receive it here rather than anywhere else."
'Lost City' will premiere on Thursday 29 October at 7.00pm in Cineworld, Belfast.
