SYNOPSIS
‘They teach us there must be a boundary
line in our lives. But man, there’s no boundary line to music.’
Derry,
Northern Ireland: there are plenty of ghettos around the world, all of them with
their own injustice, each of them living
on its knees. There is one ghetto
condemned to something even worse:
it has forgotten its music. It’s The
Fountain, in the heart of the
city: once a vibrant community, where people used to dance together
despite religious differences, now a disappearing Protestant neighborhood killed by fear and politics and turned into an open air prison, now living behind a fence.
Roy Arbuckle, a musical troubadour, decides it’s time to challenge one of the monstrosities left by the war in Northern Ireland: fear. He wants to reunite his former showband, The Signetts and his formers musicians, nowadays in their
seventies, that lived the heady glamour of the Show band era, in a high-risk attempt to try to do something that would be normal
anywhere else but not yet in Northern Ireland: having a major dance night,
inviting their old enemies and get Protestants and Catholics dancing
together. If it wasn’t enough, for this event Roy wants to open up the
stronghold of Protestant heritage and culture in Derry: the Memorial Hall,
once the most popular dance hall in the heart of the city.
A colorful, melancholic and ironic musical journey through a ghetto that, even if
it find itself in its last dance, it doesn’t want to miss a single step of it.
Let’s save pessimism for better times.
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Director: Alessandro Negrini
Producer: Margo Harkin, Besom Productions Executive Producer for BBC: Fergus Keeling Director of Photography: Odd Geir Saether Commissioned by BBC English, Italian subtitles Duration: 60 minutes |
AWARDS
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