RTS NI AWARDS 2024

FRÉWAKA/FRÉAMHACHA

Wednesday, 10TH JULY, 2024:  We are hugely proud that our Irish horror film FRÉWAKA will have its world premiere at the prestigious Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland next month.

James joyce’s ulysses

2023 grierson award nomination

September 2023

My Name Is Ottilie screening At The Queen's Film Theatre + Q&A

JANUARY 2023

A special screening of ‘My Name is Ottilie’ will take place at the QFT on Saturday 28th January 2023.

The screening will be followed by a short discussion about the documentary and the musical legacy of Ottilie Patterson. This will include soul singer Dana Masters, author Joanna Braniff and Charlotte Dryden from the Oh Yeah Music Centre in Belfast.

Special Screening of Women’s Work at the Mac

March 2022

The MAC, in association with WOMEN'STEC, presents a special event: Women's Work - Never Done.

The seminal documentary film, Women’s Work, was produced by DoubleBand films in 1997, the year before the Good Friday Agreement.

WOMEN’STEC are hosting a screening of Women’s Work in the MAC theatre on 19th March 2022 followed by a panel discussion with some of the women involved in the original film including Bronagh Hinds, founding member of Women’s Coalition (who can be seen having an altercation with Ian Paisley Snr. in the documentary) and Nuala Haughy who was the film's researcher and interviewer.

Women's Work followed the election campaigns of several women, some relatively new to the world of the Northern Irish political system, across all political parties, in the run-up to that year’s Council and General Elections. Securing just 15% of seats in the Council Elections, not one of these women was elected in the General Elections that year.

Buy tickets here

Lost Lives win at Celtic Media Festival

Sept 2021

DoubleBand Films is the proud recipients of the Torc Award for best feature documentary at the 2021 Celtic Media Festival for Lost Lives.

Find out more about Lost Lives here.

Seamus Heaney and the music of what happens

Nov 2019

The Heaney Family attended a preview screening of the BBC Two film - Arena: Seamus Heaney and the music of what happens at the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy.

Special screenings of the film also took place in the May Fair Hotel in London and the IFI Cinema in Dublin.

Seamus Heaney and the music of what happens will be shown on BBC Two on Sat 30 Nov at 9.45pm.

Lost Lives Premiere

BFI London Film Festival

Oct 2019

Stars of stage and screen gathered in London last night for the premiere of Lost Lives - the film inspired by the book of the same name which documents the deaths of all 3,700 people killed during the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland.

The film, which premiered at the London Film Festival, is woven together from the stories of 18 lives, to represent the thousands killed in the Troubles who are memorialised in the book.

Northern Irish stars Liam Neeson, Sir Kenneth Branagh, Bronagh Gallagher, James Nesbitt, Adrian Dunbar, Ciaran Hinds and Bronagh Waugh are among the actors who have lent their voices to the project.

Each narrates one of the accounts in the film, which has been made by co-directors and producers Michael Hewitt and Dermot Lavery, of Doubleband Films in Belfast.

Michael Hewitt said he considered the film an extension of the Lost Lives book, which was last printed over a decade ago.

"The book stands as a testament to the terrible loss that took place here over the 30 years and the loss that continues to ripple out amongst families," he said.

"So what the book does one way, the film has to try to do it in a slightly different way."

Belfast Telegraph

https://www.lostlivesthefilm.com/

50 Years of The Troubles: A Journey Through Film

Sept 2019

The Troubles on Film with Mark Cousins marks 50 years since sectarian riots erupted across Northern Ireland, widely seen as the beginning of the thirty-year conflict known as The Troubles. Filmmaker Mark Cousins, who left Belfast at 18 — returns to his hometown to reflect on how the place and its history have been used, and occasionally abused, by cinema. He traces how the legacy of division has impacted on the nation’s cinematic imagination; and, in a city that once boasted the biggest movie-going population in the UK, also scrambles around the ruins of Belfast’s once-grand cinemas. Mark presents a personal and alternative perspective on the Northern Irish 'Troubles' through the prism of film and reveals how his passion for cinema was ignited and fuelled by his childhood and youth in Belfast, when it offered an escape. literally and imaginatively, from the violence on the streets.

Channel 4 commissioned DoubleBand Films to explore the changing face of Northern Ireland and its depiction on screen, with Director, Brian Henry Martin and Producer, Ben O’Loan.

Feature-length Seamus Heaney biopic

April 2019

A major feature-length film about the life and work of Seamus Heaney, one of the greatest Irish poets since Yeats, has been announced by Patrick Holland, Controller BBC Two.

Heaney died, aged 74, in 2013. Six years after his death Heaney's wife Marie, and his three children Michael, Christopher and Catherine, talk about their family life and read some of the poems he wrote for them, and for the first time his four surviving brothers, Hugh, Charlie, Colum and Dan remember their childhood and the shared experiences that inspired many of his finest poems.

Seamus Heaney stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries; Death Of A Naturalist, his first collection of poems published by Faber & Faber (the first of 12) in 1966 announced the arrival of a major new talent, and his reputation grew and grew until he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

Admired and revered far beyond UK and Ireland, Heaney spoke to a whole generation of younger poets in America, many of whom he taught as a visiting professor at Harvard in the 1980s and 90s. He strode the international stage, with commentaries on Dante and Virgil, as well as a complete new translation of his beloved Beowulf, but his deepest debt was to his family, and to the landscape in which he grew up.

Patrick Holland, Controller, BBC Two, says: “Seamus Heaney is a cultural colossus who created some of the most powerful, beautiful and resonant poetry of the last 50 years. This film promises exceptional intimacy and poignancy; I am so delighted the family has agreed to share their memories of him for the BBC Two audience.”

Mark Bell, Commissioning Editor, BBC Arts, says: “We are so pleased to have been able to bring the DoubleBand team together with Adam Low and Lone Star to make a rich and tender appraisal of this great writer using the memories of his family and those closest to him.”

Seamus Heaney: The Music Of What Happens (w/t) is 1 x 90 DoubleBand Films production in association with Lone Star Productions for BBC Arts, BBC Two and BBC Northern Ireland made with funding from Northern Ireland Screen. The Executive Producer is Michael Hewitt, it was directed by Adam Low and Dermot Lavery and Martin Rosenbaum are the producers. It was commissioned by Patrick Holland, Controller, BBC Two and Mark Bell, Commissioning Editor, BBC Arts. The Commissioning Editors for the BBC are Mark Bell and Fiona Keane.

The Band

February 2019

The Band is a new series for BBC Two Northern Ireland that brings us into a remarkable world of colour, character and community. A community brought together by a shared love of music and performance.

This is the world of marching bands – a strong part of the Ulster-Scots tradition – as we have never seen it before.

Intimate and revealing, the programmes meet those involved in bands across Northern Ireland. For them, the band is family. It gives them a sense of being part of something special, a chance for cultural expression and to share the music passed down from generation to generation.

The Band is made by DoubleBand Films for BBC Northern Ireland with funding from Northern Ireland Screen’s Ulster-Scots Broadcasting Fund.