Jack Rowan and Kieron J. Walsh Bring ‘Skintown’ to Edinburgh With a Rave-Era Northern Ireland Backdrop

Jack Rowan and director Kieron J. Walsh are debuting their latest collaboration, Skintown, at the Edinburgh Film Festival, positioning the project as a vivid attempt to translate a specific time and place into a raucous indie film. In an interview tied to the festival, Walsh described the filmmaking process as “a bumpy ride,” while Rowan spoke to the difficulty of putting into cinematic form what the production set out to portray: the lived experience of young people in Northern Ireland during an era marked by conflict and fatigue.

The film’s setting, as discussed around its festival run, is Northern Ireland in the aftermath and atmosphere of the Troubles, paired with the energy of ’90s rave culture. Rowan and Walsh said the movie leans into that contrast as a way to reflect how young people looked for release, community, and momentum even when the wider environment was heavy. The portrayal is framed less as a broad historical recap and more as a focused account of youth experience, with the creators saying it is “not really been recorded” in the way they wanted.

Walsh, an Irish filmmaker, emphasized that the story’s grounding is personal and observational rather than purely documentary. He and Rowan discussed how the production aims to capture what it felt like to grow up in the region at the time, including the texture of daily life and the cultural pull of music-led scenes. The festival appearance, according to the interview coverage, is part of bringing that approach before audiences who may be less familiar with how rave spaces and youth culture intersected with the wider war-worn context of Northern Ireland.

The makers’ description of the film’s tone centers on its momentum and noise, with the centerpiece being an unruly, high-energy sensibility that reflects the era’s nightlife and the characters’ insistence on living in the present. Rather than treating disorder as spectacle, Rowan and Walsh described the approach as an attempt to show how young people navigated pressure and uncertainty while finding movement through music and social gatherings.

The Edinburgh Film Festival screening also functions as a public launch point, giving the film a platform within a major UK cultural venue that has historically served as a launchpad for independent work. For Rowan, the project continues his career in English-language screen roles, while for Walsh, it adds to his track record as a director working in and around stories shaped by Irish and British contexts.

As the film continues its festival life, attention will likely focus on how Skintown balances its musical and youthful elements with its Troubles-era setting, and whether audiences read the “bumpy ride” behind production as part of the story’s authenticity. The creators’ stated intention, as described in the interview, is to preserve a youth-centered account that they say is still under-recorded, giving viewers a more immersive sense of the time and how young people sought intensity and belonging despite the surrounding strain.

For now, the next step is simply audience access through the festival circuit, where UK and international viewers can assess the film’s translation of ’90s rave culture into a Troubles-set coming-of-life framework. The interview framing suggests the team views the work as both a cultural record and a cinematic event, built to carry its own volume into public conversation rather than fade into history without an account of what it was like.