Project Detail

The Negotiator

Jan McCullough

Synopsis

In a world riven with conflict what is needed to turn war into peace? How can all parties to a war become all parties to a peace? Experience shows it’s the presence of a critical individual in whom all sides can have confidence to chair talks and create the space for an agreement to emerge. In Northern Ireland, one of the few examples of a long-lasting negotiated peace settlement, that critical person was former US Senate Majority Leader, Senator George J Mitchell.
First sent across the Atlantic in 1995 by President Clinton, the Maine native brought patience and persistence to the task which finally saw the historic, all-party peace talks conclude on Good Friday 1998.
In this new feature documentary from Fine Point Films, Belfast director Trevor Birney explores Mitchell’s work as a negotiator in the lead-up to the Good Friday Agreement.

Details

Year: 2024
Type of project: Features
Running time: 92 min
Director: Trevor Birney
Producer: Andrew Tully, Stephen Duds
Editor: Andy Tohill

Production Status

Post-production

Production Company

Fine Point Films

Visit Website

Page updates

This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.

Suggest amendments

The story of George J. Mitchell, a working-class boy from Maine who would become the majority leader of the US Senate and one of the most respected political negotiators and leaders of his generation. From the basketball court of Bowdoin College to the streets of Berlin as a counterintelligence agent, Mitchell tells his incredible story in his own words. Filmed in his home state of Maine across the summer of 2023, this documentary showcases a problem solver who has worked across the worlds of politics, baseball, and business with an unending passion for understanding through dialogue in his country and around the world, working to bring peace to Northern Ireland.

All These Summers

Director: Therese Henningsen

Year: 2025

Driven by a recurring urge to encounter strangers with her camera, the filmmaker begins to film her solitary Greek Cypriot neighbour Pete in the tower block in London where they both live. Around the same time, her father in Denmark receives a cancer diagnosis requiring her to spend more time with him. As her father gradually slips back into the depression that made him absent when she was a teenager, she feels a need to document this transition. Her compulsion to enter into Pete’s life and to film him echoes with her desire for understanding her father’s experience of isolation and loneliness, as well as her own relationship to it. ALL THESE SUMMERS asks questions about responsibility in life and in film whilst intimately confronting the complexities of the daughter-father and filmmaker-subject relationship. Official Selection CPH DOX 2025

Biography Experimental Woman Director

Swim Sistas

Director: Catherine Joy White

Year: 2025

A poetic and visually rich love letter to water, sisterhood, and the resilience of Black women across generations. The film follows three generations of Black British women, from an Olympic trailblazer to a 54-year-old first-time swimmer, in a lyrical celebration of joy, sisterhood and resilience. Official Selection DOC NYC 2025

Black Sport Woman Director