A boy's relationship with his mother and father, set in the 1950s, along the Ulster border where his father is a village Police Sergeant.

Miles from Belfast or Dublin the village is cut off from the rest of the world by hills, lakes and politics. It is a land inhabited by smugglers, soldiers, Anglo-Irish gentry, tinkers, religious preachers, and dominated by the boy's father who is violently frustrated by his wife and the petty crimes he has to deal with. An only child, the boy is adored by his mother but terrified of his father with whom he has a love-hate relationship forever bordering on panic. Night and day he sees and is bruised by the struggles of his parents, the divisions in the lives of men and women and the pounding puzzles in his own heart and brain.

In the green, black and watery land of the Cavan-Fermanagh border the boy grows to sexual awareness and understanding of the people around him. He lives on wit and love, dodges his father's fists, learns the lies of the land and for the first time experiences that touch of flesh that melts all rock and dogma and at last gives shelter to his soul.

Though firmly rooted in its particular time and place, this is not a quaint Irish story of days gone by. There are powerful dynamics at work - supernatural forces in the form of religion, an Oedipal clash resulting in the young boy's violent expulsion from the paradise of his mother's bed, repressed sexuality and jealousy which erupts and threatens to destroy everything good, the mystery and strangeness of a first sexual encounter, a journey whose final purpose is betrayal and a spectacle intended to test God. All these powerful states and events are seen through the innocent eyes of a boy. In the film, we will experience them as urgent, vivid, dangerous and sometimes hilariously funny.

Every action the boy takes must be out of necessity as he struggles to cope with dangerous passions he can barely comprehend. The boy and his mother find their lives dominated by the erratic actions and reactions of his policeman father, a man filled paradoxically with rancour, frustration and love. The only refuge the boy has is the comfort of his mother and the bed he shares with her, the bed from which his father has been exiled. The story weaves a time bomb, which we absolutely expect to detonate.

Financing to budget of £2.25 million

A Picture Palace production

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