Laine Megaw
This is the fascinating true life story of one of Ireland's most famous unsolved murders. It is the tale of how an innocent man was found guilty but insane of the brutal homicide of a young woman from a very prominent family. Told in superb period detail, Scapegoat contains a combustible mix of sex, class, bogus respectability and dark domestic secrets
The film tells the story of two boys who become friends at the start of the Troubles in 1970. The boys share an obsession with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with the consequence that they run away to Australia.
Kyle is loyal to his wife, his best mate and his boss in the Ulster Defence Union – and they love him as a husband, a brother and a son – but, with changing times and the emerging peace process, Kyle finds himself lost in the shadows of transition, uncertainty, and betrayal. In a world turned upside down, peace and brutality walk side-by-side, while love and loyalty are sacrificed to the new order. "As the Beast Sleeps" is set in Belfast's Protestant Rathcoole housing estate and explores with an up-to-the-minute urgency, the fragmentation within an extended family of loyalists in the context of the current cease-fire.
Belfast, Christmas 1999. A poor, badly dressed woman is half walking, half stumbling down the road. She is tearful and her behaviour is so disturbed that passers-by look furtively at her before hurrying on. Her walk is purposeful though. She is hurrying to go somewhere specific. She stumbles towards a church that is lit up. As she approaches it we see a sign outside announcing "SERVICE FOR PEACE Belfast Christmas together. All Denominations, 8pm"
He's Irish, he's ageing, he drinks, is a touch cynical and when he has time writes a newspaper column. On the eve of the country's first election as an independent state, Dan Starkey's life is about to change after he finds the young woman he has just made love to dead and his only ally is a nun
