MUST SEE FILM FOR ASPIRING SCREENWRITERS

This post (and hopefully more posts in the future ) are thanks to Shane Dresser (one of the best students I've ever had the privilege to teach and a good screenwriter himself), who's got me thinking about posting again...

Not for the mainstream Hollywood crowd looking for an EDGE OF DARKNESS, but a model exercise in dealing realistically with the mechanics of raw human emotions, especially in the consequences of violence, both from the perpetrator's and the victim's point of view. Simple story structure: “17-year-old Irish-Protestant Alistair Little assassinated 19-year-old Catholic Jim Griffin in his Ulster home. The murder was witnessed by Griffin's 11-year-old brother Joe. Thirty years later, Little has been rehabilitated and released from prison, while Joe Griffin remains traumatized and bitter. But when a television talk show decides to bring them together for a live on-air reconciliation, two men haunted by one moment must come face-to-face with their own worlds of pain, violence and vengeance”. What makes this "film" (as opposed to a popcorn movie) great, is that it humanizes the world of a political struggle from an individual’s point of view, and allows the audience entrance into that community by the use of one of the most basic tenets of screenwriting – anticipation. This story is all about anticipating the “five minutes” of the title. It takes a little time to set things up, and the political references will be lost on the majority of American audiences, but ultimately riveting in the portrayal of lives that are intertwined by a single moment. The way the emotions are treated realistically is what sets it apart from a movie like EDGE OF DARKNESS. The only drawback is the language barrier, which is probably why it flew under the radar for American audiences. The authenticity of the language is challenging, which makes subtitles a good choice.