CEASEFIRE
In the early 1990s, an Irish-American journalist becomes President Clinton's secret back-channel to the IRA, gambling his life and a nation's future on the ceasefire that could end twenty-five years of war.
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The Script
The feature screenplay is in active development. Pages are furnished to producers and financiers on request — reach Lisa through the studio and a watermarked PDF follows within the day.
About Lisa
Lisanne “Lisa” Marks Canty is a film producer with Harrington Legacy Media. A technology entrepreneur before cinema — chief executive of the enterprise-blockchain firm ChainNinja, named among the Top 25 Leading Women Entrepreneurs, and founder of the nonprofit Eve’s Appetite for Cure — she left the tech world to pursue her passion for film.
She is an executive producer on Maserati: The Brothers and a producer on the upcoming psychological thriller Bloodwood, an impact-driven production announced at Cannes that shoots in Peru and Kenya’s Maasai Mara. CEASEFIRE is her project on BEATRIFUL — story, treatment, boards and this pre-vis trailer developed end-to-end, every frame human-reviewed before it rendered.
Synopsis
Belfast, year twenty-five of the Troubles. A rumpled New York newspaperman is pulled from his ordinary life to carry an extraordinary secret: the White House wants to talk to the IRA, and he is the only channel both sides will trust. Across rain-soaked meetings in Dublin hotels and West Belfast safe houses, he whispers a peace plan between men who have spent their lives at war. Bombs in Warrington and smoke at Heathrow nearly break the effort; a patrician American ambassador and an old gun runner in Queens keep it alive. On August 31, 1994, the radio announces a ceasefire — and one exhausted man finally lets himself weep.
Treatment
This is a two-and-a-half-minute theatrical trailer built as three movements and a held breath. The world is early-1990s Belfast, Dublin, Washington and New York rendered as a rain-soaked political thriller: grainy 35mm, anamorphic, available light, handheld verite in the tradition of Terry George's In the Name of the Father. The palette is drained and cold — slate greys, wet brick red, bottle green, sodium orange at night. Power lives in whispers across small tables; violence lives off-screen, in aftermath and smoke. Early frames hold generous negative space for narration — the story is carried entirely in faces, weather and light.
Movement one is quiet: an aerial over Belfast at dawn, a lone man before the misty Capitol, a lamp-lit newsroom at night. Movement two is the plan and its enemies — whispered pitches in Dublin, the President in silhouette at a snowing window, the Warrington aftermath, a masked reckoning in a safe house, an ambassador going to war politely down a marble corridor. Movement three accelerates: a single ten-second master of the journalist sprinting through night-time Belfast, sliced and intercut with flashes of the press scrum, the table-slam, the smoke at Heathrow — building rhythm until a streetlight strobes across his face and we hard cut to black.
Out of the black comes release: the radio announcement, a hotel phone with the President on the line, Belfast erupting in celebration under tricolours. We end where we began — an empty Belfast street at dawn, silent and at peace — the title CEASEFIRE composited into the negative space. A peace the dead could live with.
Beat sheet
| Cold Open | Belfast at dawn under low cloud in year twenty-five of the war; a rumpled journalist stands alone before the misty Capitol, an ordinary newspaperman about to carry a president's secret. |
| The Contact | In a rain-lashed Dublin hotel, the IRA intermediary Ted lowers his newspaper, and across a low table the journalist whispers a peace plan — and receives a warning. |
| The Gamble | The President, back to camera at a snowing window, decides to bet on peace while the IRA's weapons lie laid out and waiting — until the Warrington bomb shatters the plan. |
| The Reckoning | Summoned alone to a West Belfast safe house, the journalist faces masked IRA leaders, and the militant's violent table-slam reveals the faction that wants the war to continue. |
| Irish America | A St. Patrick's Day parade in falling snow brings Irish America onto the board; the Ambassador strides down a marble corridor to fight politely, and the secret back-channel explodes into a Belfast press scrum. |
| The Spiral | An excavator claws through a bombed Belfast storefront, the movement splits across a bare table, and smoke rises over an empty Heathrow runway — a warning written in smoke, not blood. |
| Queens, August 30 | On the Ambassador's late-night gamble, the old gun runner sells the ceasefire to a packed hall of IRA supporters while FBI sedans wait in the rain outside to arrest him if it fails. |
| The Sprint | The journalist sprints through night-time Belfast as everything he has risked flashes past — the scrum, the slam, Warrington, Heathrow — until streetlight strobes his face and we hard cut to black. |
| August 31, 1994 | Out of the black, the ceasefire is announced on the radio; the journalist breaks down, then takes a hotel phone call from the President as relief finally lands. |
| Peace | Belfast erupts in a night street celebration twenty-five years deep, then falls silent on an empty street at dawn — the held frame where the title CEASEFIRE appears. |