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Eugene

Eugene is the story of Kate, a Belfast teenager who lives with her religiously oppressive family and discovers sex and freedom when she stumbles upon her brother’s secret life after he is murdered.

synopsis

Late 1970’s. Belfast. Civil religious strife. At night the city is in riot or desolate. Kate (17) lives in a violent locality. Home is dominated by her strict Catholic father, Joe (42), and her ‘Golden Boy’ brother Eugene (21), who is starting university. Kate shuns religious devotion and housework, which generates Eugene’s reprimands. By chance, Kate discovers that Eugene did not enrol at University after leaving home. The following week he is found dead, murdered by a random gang. At the funeral Kate’s beautiful cousin Dermott (23) arrives unexpectedly, flirts with her and then apologizes to Eugene’s corpse for bringing him “to the Chariot Rooms that night”. When he leaves, Kate follows him. Outside a downtrodden house she watches him have sex with a man. Eugene becomes a martyr. Kate is suffocated by family breakdown. She sneaks out to find Dermott again and follows him to a clandestine Gay nightclub - The Chariot Rooms. The place ignites her. Kate confronts Dermott. He tells her he had sex with Eugene. Kate asks him to have sex with her. Dermott refuses. Disorientated, Kate confronts gay men to have sex with her. She leaves with a stranger, resolute to break Joe’s rules and Eugene’s myth. Back home Kate obeys Joe and returns to the gay scene.

Director’statement

Eugene is the story of a Belfast teenager, Kate, who discovers sex after the death of her brother Eugene. It is the story of how she finds freedom by strategically becoming good (at home) in order to sustain being bad – ie sexually active on Belfast’s idiosyncratic gay scene of the time. Homosexuality was illegal in the religiously obsessed Northern Ireland of the 1970’s and the gay scene in Belfast included a club, The Chariot Rooms, which sat within the gated city centre, gated and guarded by the British Army. The club also housed subversives who risked their lives to have fun. Kate is one of these people. She is not gay but discovers that she has the guts to live the life that her brother Eugene wanted, but couldn’t sustain. In Eugene the conflict in Belfast at war in the late 1970s is used as a heightened stage with which to play out the trinity of sexual, familial and obsessive interrelationships between Kate, Eugene and Dermott. Without Eugene’s death, Kate would not have been introduced to Dermott at his funeral. Without the reckless journey through a city at war to find Dermott, the excitement of sex, in and around The Chariot Rooms, would not have been as dangerous or liberating as it is for Kate.

TFL PROGRAMME:
ScriptLab 2009
Discover more details here:
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TFL Catalogue 2009

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