Winner of the Best First Feature award at the Galway Film Fleadh 2008, Peacefire, the feature debut of writer-director Macdara Vallely, is a gritty, moving and bitterly funny account of one young man’s experience of crime and punishment on a housing estate in 1990s Northern Ireland. A young working class, joy-riding hoodlum has a chance encounter with a ruthless detective who turns him into an informer for the so-called forces of law and order and a target for retribution by his father’s old acquaintances in the IRA. In the violent upheaval that follows, he must struggle with the intense loyalty he feels for his friends; the need to protect his mother from her tragic past; and the political ideals of a dead father.

Notes by Sunniva O’Flynn