Northern Ireland

“Home-grown story-telling – that’s something we do… like no other.” BBC Director-General Tim Davie made the claim while giving the Dan Gilbert Memorial Lecture at the Belfast Media Festival in mid-November.

One hundred years after the first BBC broadcast from Northern Ireland, Davie was launching the BBC Economic Impact Report for Northern Ireland. It revealed that the corporation invested £112m in the nation during 2023/24.

Over the past decade, Northern Ireland has emerged as the setting of choice for hard-hitting cop shows and gritty crime dramas. Its grey skies, beautifully bleak landscapes and violent history combined to create a distinct sense of place and a noirish backdrop for series such as The Fall, Bloodlands, Marcella and, more recently, Blue Lights. 

Nesbitt plays a Northern Irish police detective, Tom Brannick, who is dragged into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse when a car containing a suicide note is pulled out of Strangford Lough.

Brannick connects the note to an infamous cold case that is deeply personal and puts him on the hunt for a legendary assassin.  

Nesbitt commented: “It’s great to be back making a drama in and about Northern Ireland, which now has a film and television industry as good as any in the world.

So Game of Thrones is coming to an end and the world is quite rightly in mourning. But I’m not. Not just because I’m the only person in Belfast who hasn’t seen a single episode, or the only person in Belfast who hasn’t been an extra in an episode.

But because it means the amazing crew will finally be available for other work. That will be the enduring legacy of Game of Thrones and the hard work of everyone at NIScreen.

The winners are:  

Ulster University, Belfast for Animation with Hunger by Matt McDyre, Scott Gill, Daniel Boyle, Hannah Loughridge and Hannah Turkington, sponsored by Performance Film and Media Insurance. Ulster University also picked up a highly commended award in this category for To The Moon by Gianni Francesco De Giuseppe, Rhea Hanlon, Phillip McDowell and Ryan Beatty.

At the early May event, producer Brian Falconer and writer/director Jonathan Beer from Belfast production company Out Of Orbit were joined by an enthusiastic group of aspiring film-makers. 

During the 90-minute session, Falconer and Beer discussed how they got into film-making and showed a number of clips from films they had worked on, including their BAFTA award-winning short, Boogaloo and Graham.

Marc Downey, Joel McReynolds, Mark Rainey, James Mallaghan, Adam Irwin and Conor Dempsey from Belfast Metropolitan College scooped the Comedy and Entertainment Award with Mo Chara.

McReynolds, Rainey, Mallaghan and Dempsey also took the Short Feature Award with Kings Park Primary School.

The college’s Ryan Fitzsimmons, Michael Turner, Ryan Sewell and Ciaran Mooney won the Factual Award for The Shipyard Poet.

In the picturesque village of Greyabbey, on the shores of Strangford Lough, cast and crew assemble for the latest network drama to be shot in Northern Ireland. The Woman in White is a five-part adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s psychological thriller for BBC One. The period drama joins a BBC slate that in the past year has included The Fall, Line of Duty and My Mother and Other Strangers.