Now in its third year, ENGAGE is an EU Media Desk funded scheme set up to encourage film co-production collaberations between writers, directors and producers from Estonia, Finland, UK and Ireland. Graduates from IADT National Film School in Dublin, Screen Academy Scotland in Edinburgh, Baltic Film School in Tallinn and Aalto Film Institute in Helsinki took part in three workshops across these cities.
My name is Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair and I’m a 24-year old Dublin-based screenwriter/director. I had written three drafts of a feature film, BORDER TOWN, for my Masters in Screenwriting and since leaving college I found I had little focus or a sense of direction in which to turn. I knew I could write and I knew what made a good script work but to be perfectly honest, I needed an intervention of sorts to get me going. Eventless, dull week followed eventless, dull week and every now and again came the fear that this was how it was going to always be. So in an attempt to change this, I applied to Engage 2011.
In April, the first of the workshops commenced. A brief speed-dating style session of a meet-and-greet commenced and ended in thirty minutes before we were hastily sectioned into groups to begin rigorous pitching sessions. I hate those kinds of things, especially being put under pressure/put on the spot and having to introduce who you are, explain your work and participation in a programme that has so many young and talented, very hard-working and very inspirational filmmakers involved. I was overwhelmed by the fear that I had no place there among them. Pitching (my god, pitching!) my own work terrified me. By the end of the three days in Dublin, 30 complete strangers from across Europe became intensely close friends and we were sorry to see each other depart home but we all had a lot of work to do in the two months before the Edinburgh workshop in June.
My Masters screenplay, BORDER TOWN is a hard-boiled crime drama set in my hometown of Dundalk and charts the fall of a hardened family of Gardaí through a town tragedy, a drug war along the border and a rampaging revenge mob. It culminates with the stoic female cop protagonist making the ultimate choice for blood loyalty or justice. As a project I was, and still am, proud of it. It’s been a difficult, uphill battle to develop and to hone exactly what makes it significant but when I started pitching it; it was immediately liked and discussed. References to Film Noir, cop movies, morality tales were flying around the room. It made my head spin and gave me a real boost to hear it discussed and debated with such fervor from people I’d only really known a few hours. Someone even likened it to Antigone in a modern setting, which I was extremely chuffed about. Still, it was far away from being in any good working shape.
At the end of the Dublin workshop, Joseph Atkinson, a producer my own age from Edinburgh, challenged me on the two-line idea I had on my handbook profile called DEATH RATTLE, a western idea I had been tinkering with – a ‘potato western’ – one that takes place in Ireland during the famine, has all the archetypes, themes and iconography of classic westerns of Peckinpah and Ford but transports them to a setting of a brutal famine-ridden Ireland. It tells the story of an Irish-American returning to his homeland against the tide of a mass exodus to find that his hometown has been taken over by an oppressive, self-serving landlord. He forms a reluctant alliance with a brutal female headhunter to win back the town in an all-or-nothing, bloody standoff.
In the Edinburgh workshop, we honed down the idea, discussed strategies for a project of that scale and how we’d even begin to look for funding. Delegates from China and Canada had also participated in the Scottish workshop and veteran Canadian TV producer Bernard Bourrét expressed the possibility of taking a project like DEATH RATTLE to Canada, how we could shoot it there, make use of the tax incentives in place there and how it would lead to North American distribution interest. I couldn’t get over the enthusiasm that had suddenly generated for the project. It quickly gathered momentum and became the most talked about project of Engage. We practiced our pitching, had more one-on-one workshops and set about a schedule for me to commence writing a first draft once I returned to Dublin.
At the same time, two producers Sarah Snuggs from UK and Tiiu-Ann Pello from Estonia got more involved in the progress of BORDER TOWN and it also began to find its legs.
One of the wonderful things about Engage is the participation of tutors from each of the colleges. The Estonians, in particular, absolutely loved BORDER TOWN and did all they could to revive it, helping me get it back on track. Jüri Sillart, who was at one time a cinematographer to Kieslowski and had been a long-time teacher of film in Baltic Film School, had a particularly fresh way of approaching work and working with him on a one-to-one basis was one of the most intellectually challenging tutorials I’ve had. He presented the idea of addressing each element of the film in regard to theme, style and genre and how they conceptually interlinked with each other. Since I had only naively wanted to make an archetypal thriller that could be written well without any conceptual significance, it was the first time I began to address what my work was really about, what I was trying to say with it, what would be different about it and how that would come across in a pitch.
The last workshop in Tallinn and Helsinki in September was a grueling challenge for all of us and one saddened immensely by the then-recent sudden death of Jüri. We ate and drank in his honour and put in one of the hardest, most intensive weeks of work we have ever experienced. We readied ourselves for the final pitching competition in Helsinki, an event that several prominent members from each country’s film-funding foundations judged. For all of us, it was a very big deal and a chance to showcase the quality of work we were capable of creating together. I saw thirty people pitch just as many collaborative, fully formed and well-developed ideas to a panel of interested representatives. I pitched BORDER TOWN with Sarah and DEATH RATTLE with Joseph. We came second with DEATH RATTLE and took home a £2,000 prize.
I flew home from Helsinki via Oslo on Saturday morning without a wink of sleep, having embarked straight from the after-party. It had only been six short months but so much had happened since the first workshop. The effect of Engage, the confidence it gave me along with a clear sense of direction, led to so many successful plot twists of my own in the short-term. In July, I won Galway Film Fleadh’s Pitching Competition with DEATH RATTLE, something I couldn’t have done without Joseph’s support and belief in the project. Around the same time, Katie Holly of Blinder Films took me onboard to assist Development Executive Michael Kinirons. I help develop features and television series for the company. I read scripts, write reports and actively seek new projects and collaborations. It’s the toughest gig I ever had but eventless, dull weeks are a thing of the past. While DEATH RATTLE and BORDER TOWN have been temporarily put on the shelf for now, I’m currently working on some new ideas including a psychological horror called TOTEM and really sinking my teeth into my development work with Blinder Films.
I still keep in touch with all Engage members and have some very fond memories of drinking JD and singing Tom Waits along Dun Laoghaire pier, sitting on the back of a bus with a ukulele eating Scottish blossom honey and provincial cheddar somewhere in the Trossachs, sitting in a Depeche Mode-themed bar in Tallinn and ordering up lethal “Never Let Me Down Again” cocktails and drinking champagne in celebration in “Dubrovnik”, Aki Kaurismäki’s retro cabaret bar on our last night together in Helsinki. I realized that while we would never be together again as a group, I knew we’d eventually be bumping into each other at film festivals, keeping our Skype conferences and discussing further projects across the years to come.
