Fingerprints movie set to make its mark at festivals

A TEENAGE screenwriter from Ballymun is the creative mastermind behind a new short movie that masterfully depicts the reality of children living in high risk homes in Dublin.

Starring Love/Hate’s Mary Murray (Janet Hartigan) and John Connors (Patrick Ward) Fingerprints is a direct result of an innovative and inventive screenwriting course at the Ballymun Regional Youth Resource Centre (BRYR).

Led by actor Jeff O’Toole (Legend, Intermission, Crush Proof), kids and teenagers across the greater Ballymun area began to write and develop their own screenplays after O’Toole had initial success with drama classes at the centre.

The course aimed to provide young people from working class backgrounds with an opportunity to write and produce their own short films.

The scripts were entered into a competition and after some initial deliberation with Sundance winning director Jimmy Smallhorne, 19-year-old Siobhan Duffy’s Fingerprints was the clear pick of the bunch for O’Toole.

Filmed in Ballymun, Fingerprints tells the story of a troubled boy and his relationship with his teacher, Miss Holden.

Through their hardships and struggle, the two develop a mutual friendship spawned through the difficulties endured during their troubled personal lives.

O’Toole explained why Fingerprints was chosen from the competition.

“Initially I gave everybody a challenge to come up with a synopsis of a story and a sample scene,” he told Northside People.

“They all came back and Siobhan’s just grabbed me because David, the character in the story, is coming from a troubled background, and we work with young people here like that all the time.

“She knew the reality, and she had seen children in the area and in the flats like that all the time.

“She understood the troubles that they were going through and I just thought for a young girl, at 19, to be able to write something like that, I thought there was something special there.”

The script also attracted other high profile names in the film industry, such as Fionn Comerford and Tony Cranstoun. Comerford, who had previously worked as a director of photography on films such as the Harry Potter series and Black Hawk Down, was drawn to the script’s power and agreed to do the film for free after his first reading; as did Cranstoun, a BAFTA winning editor for his work on ITV’s The Royle Family. 

IFTA winning sound editor Nikki Moss and renowned New York composer, Joel Diamond, were then added to the mix to round out a critically acclaimed cast and crew.

All involved chose to work on the film free of charge, with the script’s powerful plotline enough of an encouragement for them to waive any of their usual fees.

The film took just over three days to shoot, and has been submitted to both national and international film festivals.

O’Toole will be waiting over the coming months to find out if the film will be accepted into prospective film festivals.

But for the moment it has been submitted into the Galway, Cork, Leeds, and Los Angeles festivals. 

Jack O’Toole