Parents of tragic Jamie seek Oscar boycott of Irish film
AN IRISH film director has come out fighting against a wave of criticism of his film about murdered toddler Jamie Bulger, including from the boy’s parents.
Denise Fergus and Ralph Bulger say they’re furious Vincent Lambe didn’t tell them he was making the docudrama, titled Detainment.
They branded the film as offensive’ and ‘sympathetic’ to the ten-year-old killers.
They also said the movie, which has been shortlisted for an Oscar in the short film category, should be dropped from contention for the prestigious award.
Ms Fergus was out shopping in the Strand centre in Merseyside, Liverpool, with two-year-old James on February 12, 1993 when she momentarily let go of his hand – and school truants Jon Venables and Robert Thompson led him away.
‘I never intended any disrespect’
They brutally beat and tortured the little boy, leaving him with 12 skull fractures, before they laid his body across railway tracks in a bid to make it look like an accident.
Speaking yesterday, Mr Lambe explained that he didn’t want the parents to have any input into the film, saying that – in effect – theirs was not the only perspective on the killing of Jamie by the two ten-year-olds.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio 1’s Ryan Tubridy Show, he also said that he didn’t mean to upset the family.
Ms Fergus, who has campaigned against what she called the lenient sentence handed down to her son’s child killers, has called for a general boycott of the film.
Lasting just 30 minutes, Detainment, produced by Twelve Media Group, is based on interview transcripts and records from the investigation which followed James’s abduction and murder by the boys. Ely Solan and Leon Hughes play the young killers.
It is almost entirely shot from their point of view and Mr Lambe has said he wanted to ‘humanise’ the child killers. However, it has been condemned as ‘sympathetic’ to them by Mr Bulger.
Retired UK detective superintendent Albert Kirby, who led the hunt for James’s killers, described the film as lacking decency.
But Mr Lambe told Tubridy: ‘I do have enormous sympathy for the Bulger family and I am incredibly sorry for any upset the film has caused to them. It was never intended to bring any more anguish to the Bulger family.’
Asked why he didn’t contact the family, he said: ‘I never intended to cause any disrespect by not contacting the family.
‘I have offered to meet and explain to Denise the reasons for making the film and why.
‘But also there is more than one perspective on the case.
‘We wanted to make a film that was impartial and focused solely on the factual material which has been public knowledge for 25 years. We decided not to contact any of the families for that reason. If you contact one family, there is
‘The transcripts are my Bible’
pressure to tell it the way they want it to be told.
‘Contacting the families doesn’t change what’s in the transcripts but, most likely, it would change what would be in the film.
‘And then you’re just suppressing information and you’re telling a version of the truth when the transcripts are there.’
He described the transcripts as ‘my Bible’ and said that no matter what anybody has to say, ‘nothing is going to change those’.
And he added: ‘We didn’t want to put an opinion on the film, but at the same time, I didn’t want to cause any distress.
He also criticised Mr Kirby and insisted the retired detective could not have seen the film if he was attacking it as ‘lacking decency’. The Irish Daily Mail attempted to contact Mr Lambe last night without success.
Despite their initial denials, Venables and Thompson were both eventually found guilty of abduction and murder in November 1993. They were subsequently released on lifelong licence when they were 18 years old and given new identities. But in 2010, Venables was sent back to prison for breaching the terms of his licence. He was released in 2013 before being jailed again in November 2017 for possessing child abuse images.
Mr Kirby told the Liverpool Echo newspaper in 2013 that he would like to ‘meet them on a man-toman basis’.
He spoke of how he would like to ‘sit down and talk to them – not so much about what happened but where their lives have gone and how they coped with it’.
He said doing that would help answer so many questions in his mind.
‘I’d then shake their hands and wish them all the best for the future,’ he said, adding: ‘There would be no animosity.’