The Young Offenders

#IrishAbroad: Peter Foott’s The Young Offenders heads to Fantastic Fest

Peter Foott’s The Young Offenders, the hilarious comedy about two complete idiots from Cork, will have its international premiere at the prestigious Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas next month.

Inspired by the true story of Ireland’s biggest cocaine seizure in 2007, The Young Offenders is a comedy road movie about best friends Conor and Jock, two inner-city teenagers from Cork who dress the same, act the same, and even have the same bum-fluff moustaches.

Jock is a legendary bike thief who plays a daily game of cat-and-mouse with the bike-theft-obsessed Garda Sergeant Healy. When a drug-trafficking boat capsizes off the coast of West Cork and 61 bales of cocaine, each worth €7m, are seized, word gets out that there is a bale missing. The boys steal two bikes and go on a road trip hoping to find the missing bale which they can sell so as to escape their troubled home lives…. But Sergeant Healy is in hot pursuit.

The film stars newcomers Alex Murphy and Chris Walley, Ciaran Bermingham (Patrick’s Day), PJ Gallagher (Naked Camera), and Hilary Rose (The Centre,The Republic of Telly). Produced by Julie Ryan, it is a Vico Films production with Cormac Fox and Michael Doherty as executive producers. Creative talent includes Director of Photography Patrick Jordan (Talking to My Father, Leave), and Editor Colin Campbell (You’re Ugly Too), with music from Ray Harman (Love/Hate, Patrick’s Day).

Fantastic Fest is now 11 years old. It was founded in 2005 by Tim League of Alamo Drafthouse, Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, Paul Alvarado-Dykstra, and Tim McCanlies, writer of The Iron Giant and Secondhand Lions. The festival was created to offer exposure to genre films which are often overlooked by the traditional festival circuit. It strives to offer acquisition and media and exhibition opportunities for undistributed films, as well as spotlight upcoming genre theatrical releases and repertory genre classics. The 2016 festival runs September 22nd to 29th.

Irish audiences will have their chance to see The Young Offenders when Wildcard Distribution releases it on September 16th.

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