Irish genre film-making is enjoying something of a renaissance at present, what with recent fayre like Hammer’s Wake Wood doing solid business, while Ciaran Foy’s Citadel and Sundance hit Grabbers receive glowing reviews at some of the biggest festivals in the World.
Yessir. Life seems sweet for the Emerald Isle’s genre film-makers.
Hoping to add his name to the above list is writer/director, Jason Figgis.
Figgis, whose past credits include several award-winning documentaries, not to mention a 2 year stint working on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, has recently finished production on his latest offering, a “sci-fi chiller” feature flick entitled, Railway Children
The tagline is simple. “What if playtime lasted forever?”
Well, the Railway Children are aiming to find out…
The synopsis is as follows,
The world has been devastated by a virus that has decimated the adult population leaving small children and teenagers to roam the scarred landscape attempting to form some kind of society with dramatic and violent results.
Sisters Evie and Fran have been travelling from town to town, gathering food and finding accommodation as they move from place to place. Finding overnight shelter in a derelict building, the sisters soon settle down only to be awoken by shouts from another room. Investigating, Evie witnesses the beating of a girl. She watches in horror until the mob leaves the building and the girl behind.
Tentatively going to her aid, the girl whom Evie discovers is called Alice leads them to a large building at the edge of the city from where they hear singing coming from a basement window. They investigate and so begins a battle of wills between newcomers and those holding tenuous threads of a commune civilisation together; add to this further invidious threats from two of the girls’ darker pasts and an already tense atmosphere is soon to explode into disturbing violence and bloodshed.
Filmed at locations in and around Dublin, Railway Children was written and directed by Figgis and co-produced with his business partner Jason Shalloe and stars Catherine Wrigglesworth, Emily Forster and Justine Rodgers.
Expect the film to make the rounds on the festival circuit later this year and into 2013.
More as we have it…
