Time for Peace

Ten years ago, filmmakers Tricia Regan and Jenifer McShane traveled to Northern Ireland and chronicled the efforts of a grassroots movement for peace. Many critics and political hardliners called the movement naïve. Their film, Leap of Faith, was nominated for an Academy Award and was seen all over the world. Now, ten years later, Regan and McShane plan to return to Northern Ireland to film Time for Peace, their attempt to discover if perhaps the critics of the peace effort were right.

After the first public screening of A Leap of Faith at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, a young man asked why it was worth creating any integrated schools in Northern Ireland if only 2 percent of children would attend. What good would it do if only two percent of a nation's children were not bigoted?

An African American woman stood up, without raising her hand, and said: "I rarely speak in public, but that comment makes me furious. After all, it was just one, small woman named Rosa Parks who refused to stand up on a bus - just one woman who started an entire movement."

The integrated school movement in Northern Ireland is a grassroots movement of parents and teachers that began in 1981. There are now integrated schools located throughout Northern Ireland, educating 17,000 children, with seven new schools due to open in September 2004. These schools have been quietly educating the next generation of the Northern Irish population with an emphasis on tolerance, peace, conflict resolution, and understanding.

Are these dedicated parents and teachers naïve? Can two percent of the population reverse hundreds of years of prejudice and hatred? Do these children, many of them now young adults, have a different perspective than their counterparts in the segregated school system? Are these children more committed to peace? Time for Peace will attempt to answer these questions.

Although much of the paramilitary violence has ceased in Northern Ireland, the region is still very much divided. There are many who believe that Northern Ireland's Catholics and Protestants live more separately than ever before. For instance, there are more "peace walls" (actual walls put up to separate Catholic and Protestant communities) than there were at the time of the first ceasefire in 1994. And after ten years of political struggle over the peace process, a recent poll showed that only 30% of the Northern Irish people believe that the rift between Catholics and Protestants is diminishing.

Time for Peace would like to ask the stars of A Leap of Faith, the question: "Now that your parents and teachers have struggled to give you a different kind of education - what are you going to do to make a change in your community? What are you going to do to help build peace in your community?"

Time for Peace will gather these young people in one room, set up the cameras, and put the movie in their hands. The filmmakers will ask them to come up with a plan, an event, and a project that will help to make improve community relations.

In his New York Times review, critic Stephen Holden called A Leap of Faith, "an inspiring story of people planting a small seed of hope in the bleakest of political climates." Tricia Regan and Jenifer McShane plan to return to Belfast, and see what has become of that "small seed of hope."