Vinny Cunningham

On the 14th August 1969 the British Army were deployed onto Northern Ireland’s streets for the first time, to relieve an exhausted RUC in the wake of the Battle of the Bogside. As they entered the city the troops were confronted with a ring of barricades surrounding the Bogside area and manned by the rioters, presenting them with an instant dilemma – to attempt to remove the barricades and provoke a confrontation, or to leave the barricades intact and allow the Bogside to remain beyond official law & order?

Feature documentary on the 3-days of riots in Derry, Northern Ireland that led to the deployment of British Troops into Derry in August 1969.

Exodus charts the decline of the Protestant population from Derry’s Cityside - which saw up to one in five of the City’s population leave their homes over a thirty year period. Directed and produced by Vinny Cunningham and John Peto, Exodus is the final film in the three part trilogy that commenced with Battle of the Bogside and No Go: Free Derry.

Squaddies on the Frontline tells the story of the British Army's experience of the Northern Ireland conflict through the eyes of the ordinary men and women that soldiered here. For almost 40 years between 1969 and 2007, a total of over a quarter-of-a-million soldiers served on the streets of Northern Ireland in 'Operation Banner', the British Army's longest ever operation. These men and women were at the heart of the key events of the conflict, with over 700 soldiers killed and more than 6,000 injured, and a further 305 deaths attributed to them. Squaddies on the Frontline is their story, taking viewers into the heart of 'Operation Banner' and the day-to-day realities of life and work here as a soldier through some of the toughest years of the Troubles, looking at the impact that it had, and continues to have, on their lives and the lives of those around them, both in Northern Ireland and beyond.

30th January 2022 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. As the people of Derry city came together to commemorate the event, a bold new piece of musical theatre was staged in the Guildhall - the intended but never-reached destination for the fateful 1972 civil rights march. Commissioned by the city’s Playhouse Theatre, The White Handkerchief seeks to create a dramatic elegy to the 13 killed alongside those others injured, and to catalyse a creative legacy from those devastating events. The result is a bold experiment which renders the events of Bloody Sunday on a vivid new audio-visual canvas and seeks to inspire a new generation of local talent in musical theatre, offering a bright and unexpected legacy of that day 50 years ago. Filmed over nine months, this intimate portrait takes viewers into the heart of the production and a city striving to come to terms with the defining event of its recent history.