The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce tells of the final days of Irish convict Alexander Pearce as he awaits execution for a shocking crime and confesses all to Father Conolly.
Alexander Pearce is played by Enniskillen-born
actor Ciaran McMenamin while fellow
Fermanagh actor Adrian Dunbar plays Fr Conolly.
In 1819 farm labourer Alexander Pearce is sentenced to seven years
in the new penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (now known as
Tasmania). His crime is the theft of six pairs of shoes.
In the same year, Catholic priest Philip Conolly is sent to the
same area to administer religious guidance to the damned there.
Within six months of arriving on Van Diemen’s Land, Alexander
Pearce has been flogged over 200 times for a variety of misdemeanors
and finds himself being transferred to the notorious Sarah Island
- a place of secondary punishment with a regime chillingly calculated
to strike fear into the hearts of the most hardened of convicts.
He is thought beyond salvation and will soon be brutalised, tortured
and degraded beyond comprehension. Consumed by thoughts of escape,
Pearce quickly falls in with like-minded convicts and the English
ex-mariner, Robert Greenhill.
Between them, they hatch an escape plan. Soon eight men crash into
the rainforest with little more than an axe and a plan to go where
no white man has gone before - across the extreme wilderness of Tasmania.
Lieutenant John Cuthbertson, in charge of Sarah Island, doesn’t
waste time or valuable men pursuing them. They will surely all die
within days.
Hunger sets in and quickly the awful decision to eat one of the group
is reached. Alexander Dalton, the convict flogger, is the logical
choice. Greenhill slits his throat and the butcher Matthew Travers
decapitates him.
All but two of the group take Dalton’s flesh. Within weeks
only Greenhill and Pearce are left alive. It is nearly 50 days since
they escaped. Both men are close to death and potential freedom.
When Pearce is eventually captured by British authorities he readily
confesses his crimes. The magistrate refuses to believe him. No European
could resort to such depravity and Pearce is sent back to Sarah Island
to complete the remainder of his sentence.
Within weeks Pearce escapes again with the help of another convict,
Thomas Cox. When the authorities catch up with Pearce he is lying
beside the decimated remains of Cox.
During his six months incarcerated in Hobart Gaol, Alexander Pearce
meets Father Phillip Conolly. Both men are from the same part of
Ireland and know of each other. Alexander Pearce confesses everything
to the priest. Conolly’s faith in his God is tested by what
he hears.
Alexander Pearce is executed on July 19, 1824. Under orders from
the Judge, his body is dissected for science. His skull remains to
this day in the Museum of Pennsylvania.
His last confessions, meanwhile, remain hidden for nearly 30 years.
This is the remarkable story of how one man endured the unimaginable
by doing the unthinkable.
Told as a factual drama The Last Confession
of Alexander Pearce features the stunning and foreboding landscape
of south west Tasmania and immaculate acting performances that draw
a visceral and compelling picture of hell on earth.
Producer and writer Nial
Fulton, who is also from Enniskillen, says: “I want people
to be shocked by our film but perhaps not in the way they imagined.
This is a film about hunger and man’s inhumanity.
"To my mind, the real
horror isn’t what these men did to each other but the sheer
brutality of a system in which they felt there was no hope, where
they were driven to commit unspeakable acts out of sheer desperation.
“With this film, we drew a line in the sand and said, ‘Let’s
not accept second best - let’s just aim high and see what happens,’
When you’ve got something that
you’ve
been passionate about for so long I found it impossible to say, ‘Well,
that’ll do.’
"We had to push every component of the film to be the very best it
could be. I wrote the first draft of the script 10 years ago and
in the margin I scribbled Ciaran and Adrian’s names against
their respective characters.
So when the lads walked onto the set in character 10 years later,
it was quite a moment.
"Although all three of us hail from Enniskillen, this was the first time we’d worked together. Looking back, it was a very Fermanagh thing to do, to travel to the most remote island in the world and then head off to the most remote part of that island to make a film about a cannibal and a priest from our neck of the woods!”
Ciaran McMenamin, who plays Pearce, says: “Nial and I really wanted to humanise the story of Alexander Pearce and make it real. Over the years this man has been demonised but we felt it was important to show him as an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation.”
Ciaran says he believes Pearce’s confession to be the true
account of what happened to his seven fellow escapees in the Tasmanian
wilderness:
“Of course, an issue with this story is that there was only
one witness and the question is, can we actually believe his confession?
I think this ultimately has to be left up to the viewer, but I would
say the fact that he confessed at all when he had no need to says
a lot.”
Adrian Dunbar, meanwhile, is certain that through his experiences
ministering in Van Diemen’s Land, Conolly was politicised into
campaigning for prisoners’ rights. “He probably felt
that most of the people under his care were criminals and justly
sent to the colonies. But he gradually realised over time that
the system wasn’t just, that the length of the sentences
was unjust and he started agitating against it.
“Probably the most extraordinary thing about the place Pearce
escaped into is that there’s nothing recognisable to eat, there’s
just nothing to eat out there unless you catch something. The barrenness,
the noises at night would have been very scary.”
Originally broadcast in Australia earlier this year, The Last Confession
Of Alexander Pearce received rave reviews with the Sunday Times
there saying: “A stellar cast... A compelling and disturbing
drama”. The Sunday Herald describing it as: “Morally
confronting and compelling... The movie is a beauty... excellent
performances”. And Inside Film saying: “A gritty and
haunting morality tale, a masterfully sketched portrait of religious
faith, human guilt and what divides men from beasts.”
The film was also nominated in the
single drama category at this year’s Irish
Film and Television Awards.
The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce is an Essential Media and Entertainment production for BBC Northern Ireland.