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Monday 31 October 2016

A Filmmaker you could all learn from.


I wrote recently regarding the 56 first time British & Irish directors that I have worked with over the last eighteen years, distributing their films in the UK & Ireland. I am afraid it made for very sobering reading. 31 of these directors, now have absolutely no involvement with any aspect of film or programme making and have moved onto other unconnected careers.

However, there are some directors I worked with, who have done well and they are to be admired for carrying on with the fight to make their films. For a fight it is, unless they became one of the 3% who move on to other films with relative ease. 

One such pugilist, not in that 3% is the Irish director Maeve Murphy, who is without a doubt the hardest working auteur I have ever come across. For Maeve is a terrier who just never ever gives up.




I distributed her first film SILENT GRACE, a hard hitting drama starring Orla Brady and Connor Mullen which is based upon a true story of female IRA political prisoners in Belfast who carried out their own dirty campaign. I licensed it from the sales company Moviehouse in Cannes in 2001. It was the first film they represented worldwide and their first sale was to me.

I released it in the cinema in the UK and then on rental video and finally retail video/ DVD.




It was good enough for Maeve to make two more films BEYOND THE FIRE and TAKING STOCK. I doubt any of her films have produced her decent financial rewards, but that has not stopped her making movies. Unlike almost every other director I have worked with in the last twenty years or so she has never forgotten her first film, and more importantly she just won’t let me forget it either.




I have taken it to all UK & Irish broadcasters, several times, and sadly it was rejected. The problem is that there are just so many films made every year that UK broadcasters show but a fraction of all the films in the world.

It is said that that there are now over 7,000 feature films made every year throughout the world. (Chris Jones author of the Guerilla Filmmakers Hanbook series - thinks that figure is greater).


In the UK only around 1,000 are screened per annum in the cinema and/or on UK terrestrial and cable TV. Maybe a further 1-2,000 of these new films, at the most, wind up on Amazon and Netflix. Thus the majority are lost to UK audiences.






On four different occasions I have discussed SILENT GRACE, when at the Galway Film Fleah, with the Irish broadcaster TG4. On the last approach I was told not to submit it to them again as they were not going to take it.

Most people would have given up. Not Maeve. She has for the past two years continued to do everything she can to try to persuade, in a friendly way TG4 to reconsider and to license the film. For a while I was irritated by this, but now I look forward to her emails to them, which I am cc’d into, to see how she can remind them of the film in a new approach, carefully avoiding being repetitive.




I really do hope she gets to make a fourth film soon, and more importantly that her hard work pays off and TG4 at last license the film, for it is a good one, and one that covers a small but important part of Irish history which everyone but Maeve forgot. 

So for all you emerging filmmakers out there you need to do a "Maeve", and be a terrier who never gives up. 





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