Chichester Cinema at New Park
Paradiso
Joint winner as the best documentary voted by our audience in the 19th Chichester Film FestivalA charming and melancholic documentary about the attempt to bring Catholics and Protestants together in Derry, Northern Ireland for a major dance night in the Memorial Hall.
Derry, Northern Ireland: 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 Ireland 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 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.
Ireland · 2010 · Alessandro Negrini · 60min
