Skintown: From Enniskillen Novel to Edinburgh Prize-Winner on Screen
A film rooted in a small Northern Irish town during the fragile days of the 1994 IRA ceasefire has taken one of Britain's most generous film awards. Skintown, directed by Kieron J. Walsh, won the £50,000 Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence at the 2026 Edinburgh International Film Festival (Fermanagh Herald).
The story is set in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, in 1994 — the year the IRA announced its ceasefire and The Troubles, the decades-long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, entered a new and uncertain phase. Against that backdrop, two young friends, Vinny and Jonty, are pressganged into a caper involving ecstasy tablets stolen from the UVF, a loyalist paramilitary group (Variety).
Jack Rowan, known to British television audiences from Peaky Blinders and Born to Kill, plays the lead character Vinny. Hope Ipoku Jr. plays Wilson, a Black squaddie from Manchester — a British army soldier whose presence threads the military reality of the era into the story. The wider cast includes Roisin Gallagher, Jamie Lee O'Donnell, Chris Walley, Michael Smiley and Tara Lynn O'Neill (Variety).
The film is an adaptation of a 2018 novel by Ciarán McMenamin, an Enniskillen native who also wrote the screenplay. Walsh, whose previous credits include Jump and The Railway Children, directs from McMenamin's script (Variety).
The Sean Connery Prize, awarded at Edinburgh's revived film festival, carries a cash value of £50,000 — a meaningful sum for an independent production, and one that places Skintown in the company of films the festival has championed as it rebuilds its profile under new leadership. The prize money goes to the film's creative team to support future work.
That a film this locally rooted — shot in and around the Fermanagh landscape, drawn from a novelist's firsthand knowledge of the town — should land an international festival prize speaks to the particular pull of Troubles-era stories. The period remains a rich, complicated seam for storytellers: small communities navigating daily life alongside paramilitary structures, military occupation, and the flickering possibility of peace.
Skintown was developed with support from Northern Ireland Screen, the region's screen agency, which has built a steady pipeline of productions shooting in Northern Ireland by offering locations, crew infrastructure and funding (Northern Ireland Screen).
For audiences, the film joins a growing shelf of recent Northern Irish cinema — Belfast, An Irish Goodbye, Nowhere Special — that takes the region's history as setting rather than lecture, finding humour and humanity inside difficult chapters. Skintown's particular angle, pairing a paramilitary-ecstasy heist with the ceasefire moment, folds the surreal into the historical.
A wide release date has not yet been confirmed.
