RATHKEALE’s Bill Bradshaw is a man of talents. This prison officer took early retirement to write a best selling novel, ‘From the Horse’s Mouth – a Jailor’s Tale’, which has become essential reading for University of Phoenix’s Correctional Studies Course.
There’s more: the book was adopted to feature-length screenplay and is being developed by Ballpark Films in Britain. Then Amazon published a second novel, ‘Hello Welcome’, two years ago. There was a poetry book published in 1995 with a Dublin journalist, ‘A Bar Room for Two’ and being a reader and writer of poetry has influenced his 2015 Feakle made film.
Hence, expectation is solid for Bradshaw’s 12minute short as director/ writer/ producer, ‘The Long Night Followed’. Join a broken Zeb Moore of Limerick’s Magic Roundabout, a man haunted by the ghosts of times past. Hallucination in alcohol or well founded fear?
Moore has really made the cut in celluloid the past 18 months with megabucks ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ and indie ‘The Quiet Hour’ which premiered in Cannes. “Zeb is a brilliant actor, one of the best in the country today,” observes Bradshaw. “He does not get the mission he deserves, he should be acting in big name feature films”.
Is his character purposefully an Everyman? “Very much so,” the director confirms. “I sat down with Zeb months before we did the shoot in which first and last, he is seen walking to and from the pub. I have a second short companion piece written for this, the same character if not the same actor – I haven’t spoken to Zeb yet about it, he’s one busy man – and [character] is at another time of his life”.
It’s more or less a prologue for this year’s film which is likely to premier here at Moore’s Richard Harris International Film Festival at the October weekend. Bradshaw has scripted ‘The Long Night Followed’ without dialogue but with the overlay of poetic narrative, atmospherically “in old style” to bring to life this “somebody travelling back to the furthest corner of their mind”.
There’s an ambivalence as to whether the state of fear is real and with this concept of un-named terror as paralysis, the director has been in touch with sexual abuse survivors’ group One in Four about the film. Talks are in progress.
“So far the film has been granted official selection at both The TOFF Film Festival in New York and The 12 Month Film Festival in Romania. From there, we’ve been selected for Italy’s Roma International Short Film Festival, our biggest yet.
“Zeb was also nominated in the Best Actor category in Romania…The score comprises of three original pieces by US soundtrack composer Ross Bugden and the cinematographer was Adrian O’Connor of Black Umbrella Productions”.
