Category: Current Projects

Gangs of New York meets Field of Dreams in Irish Victorian Glasgow.

Colin MacDonald has written the screenplay for this epic film about immigration, set in the oppressed and impoverished Irish community in Glasgow, Scotland in the 1880s.

Paradise is a compelling narrative of one dramatic strand of the tragically eternal immigrant experience.

The film is centred on the foundation of Celtic Football Club by the post-famine Irish community in Glasgow in 1888.

The lead character is the Marist teacher Brother Walfrid, who had survived “the great hunger” as a child in Sligo. The club’s founding mission statement encapsulated his charitable vision.

“A football club will be formed for the maintenance of dinner tablesfor the children and the unemployed”

Walfrid saw a way of exploiting the exploding popularity of football as a mass-spectator sport. This new club would generate income to support the “penny tables” that fed the children he also educated in the schools of the city’s east end.

More than just that, Celtic FC was created by Walfrid and his supporters as a symbol of hope and pride for the despised Irish community, whose faith, language, and poverty – and their willingness to work for lower wages – made them a target for the hatred of many in the settled native community.

These desperate aliens had poured off the boats on Glasgow’s Broomielaw in their tens of thousands in the 19th century, fleeing a homeland ravaged by famine and landlordism.

Squalid housing, backbreaking toil in the worst of jobs, and sectarian hate and discrimination became their grinding, daily experience in this new homeland.

Many of them did not take the violent aggression they encountered lying down…

As Walfrid struggles to take care of his flock he also finds himself battling to save the life and the soul of a spirited young man who is determined to fight fire with burning fire…

The unbelievably true story of the Rendlesham Forest Incidents!

…is set against the Rendlesham Forest Incidents in rural England in 1980, which now rank alongside the alleged Roswell crash in 1947 as the most significant UFO happenings of all time.

Over a three-day period at Christmas in 1980 in rural Suffolk there was a spectacular series of multi-witnessed sightings – and indeed landings – of what many of the observers believed to be alien craft.

The film is the true story of the two local women, Brenda Butler and Dot Street, who were among the first to hear about the Incidents and who then set out to investigate them and reveal them to the world.

The events took place in and around the forest adjoining and separating the vast, twin airforce bases of Bentwaters/Woodbridge which at the height of the Cold War were leased to the US Air Force.

With the collusion of the UK Government the bases secretly and illegally housed an arsenal of 500 tactical nuclear warheads, entirely undeclared to the British public and in violation of the existing nuclear treaties.

The adversary of the women in their crusade was Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, who was conflicted about his professional duty to keep a lid on events which he himself had actually experienced personally at close quarters.

The “secret” memo he wrote about the events eventually became the smoking gun that provided official military confirmation of the reality of the happenings…