The Golden West is Tom Berkeley and Ross White’s follow-up to the Oscar and IFTA-winning An Irish Goodbye.
The Golden West is a short film from writer-directors Tom Berkeley and Ross White. The film stars IFTA-winner Eileen Walsh (The Magdalene Sisters), Aoife Duffin (Lamb, Moone Boy), and Sion Ifan (Hidden, Bregus).
The short is set in 1849, and follows two feuding Irish sisters who have fled the Great Famine to search for gold in the mountains of North Wales. "But with winter approaching and nothing to show for their efforts, their age-old feud soon threatens to become deadly,” the plot description reads.
The Golden West is produced by Jamie Tarr (Fly the Flag), alongside Berkeley and White under their production banner, Floodlight Pictures. David Clarke (Mattress Men), John Kelleher (September), Kevin McGrath (An Irish Goodbye), Stephen Pomeroy, David Power (The Guarantee), and Susan Simnett (Fadia's Tree) will executive produce, and Yves Dominicy (An Irish Goodbye) will serve as associate producer.
“It’s a project we’ve been working on for the last year and a half, so we’re incredibly excited to get it out into the world in front of audiences,” Ross said, speaking to the Belfast Telegraph. “We were both fascinated by the famine and the gold rush as isolated events, but when the penny dropped that there was an overlap between the time periods, it seemed a fitting backdrop for a quite literal ‘feast or famine’ style Celtic Western.”
Berkeley said the filmmaking duo was "drawn towards all different kinds of stories" and that it was great to explore something that was “in a different wheelhouse tonally” to An Irish Goodbye. He added: “But while there are a lot of differences, we think there’s a strand of the same black comedy DNA in there that lives through all of our projects”.
The Golden West is set to be the directors’ final short film, with Ross and White now writing their debut feature film, the details of which are currently under wraps.
The short is due to begin festival release in July 2023.
