Ireland's 'The Liberator' comes to life on the screen in movie filmed in Central Mass.

Daniel O'Connell was known as "The Liberator" as he peacefully agitated for the rights of Irish people in an early 19th-century Ireland ruthlessly ruled from London.

"He was the Martin Luther King of the Irish in the early 1800s," said filmmaker William McCann of Shirley. 

Thousands of people would come to hear O'Connell speak in Ireland. At one gathering at Tara, County Meath in 1843, it has been estimated that half a million people were on hand.

McCann's $50,000 budget didn't allow for that many people, and he was filming in Central Massachusetts.

But McCann's independently produced and locally made feature film "The Liberator" will have its world premiere Aug. 24 at the Regal Cinema at Solomon Pond Mall in Marlborough.

The film was shot over six weeks last summer at locations including Bolton, Lancaster and Shirley, as well as Cape Cod. There are a number of speaking parts and another 150 people were extras.

McCann was a banker for 30 years before retiring to concentrate his energies on making "The Liberator."

It's his first time as a filmmaker, and McCann not only wrote and directed "The Liberator" but also plays O'Connell.

"It's a film I've been thinking about for decades. It's a passion project of mine going back to college," he said.

According to the film's website, "Sweeping yet intimate, this true story traces O’Connell’s rise from the dirt floors of a peasant cottage in Kerry to the marble steps of the Palace of Westminster in London."

McCann graduated from Brown University in 1987 but was also an exchange student at University College Cork In Ireland.

Tributes to Daniel O'Connell are "hard to miss" in Ireland, McCann said. O'Connell Street is one of the major streets in Dublin, Ireland's capital, and contains a huge statue of O'Connell. There are other statues of O'Connell throughout Ireland, McCann said.

However, while O'Connell is a revered figure, McCann found that not a lot of people knew about his actual story.

"It's not a very well known story but he was a colossal figure," he said. "He had just an amazing dramatic story that I thought would bring itself to being told on film." 

Also, "part of my motivation is to get the O'Connell name up there," McCann said.

O'Connell (1775-1847) is credited with helping secure Catholic emancipation in 1829, which also allowed him to take a seat in the United Kingdom Parliament to which he had twice been elected. At Westminster, O'Connell championed liberal and reform causes, but his objective of a separate Irish Parliament remained elusive. Nevertheless, he was adamantly opposed to violence as a means to an end.

Over the years McCann wrote several screenplay versions of "The Liberator" but had no luck in getting interest from the movie industry. In 2017 he wrote a version of "The Liberator" as a three-act play that was staged in Lancaster.

"That went well," McCann said. "I thought maybe we could do a scaled-down (screenplay) version, an d we filmed it."

None of the cast and crew was paid, "but I did feed them," McCann said. The $50,000 budget also went toward costumes and renting equipment.

Directing himself as O'Connell was another challenge, but McCann credited the help and expertise of his cinematographer and assistant director, Jacob Schmiedicke.

McCann found plenty of eager volunteers, including members of St. John the Evangelist Church in Clinton, where he is also a parishioner.

People who were involved with the filmmaking and their families are expected to make up a big part of the audience at Regal Cinema at Solomon Pond Mall on Wednesday. McCann has rented two theaters. The public is also welcome, but the theaters are already nearly full, he said. To access the box office, use the link buytickets.at/redabbeyproductions/721971.

"The Liberator" will also be screened Aug. 29 at Maynard Fine Arts Theatre in Maynard.

For tickets, go to buytickets.at/redabbeyproductions/728471.

McCann plans to enter "The Liberator" at "film festivals that make sense" for the subject matter, and "tap into local Irish organizations for special screenings." He'd also like to have the film available in formats such as DVD. The ultimate goal would be a distribution deal with a company.

The experience of making "The Liberator" has been all-consuming, but it's also whetted McCann's appetite for more movie projects.

"I thoroughly enjoyed the process. I have another couple of ideas kicking around," he said.

For more information about "The Liberator" go to TheLiberatorMovie.com

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Filmed in Central Mass., 'The Liberator' to be screened in Marlborough