Next Thursday Belfast will experience a grand gala night with the world charity premiere of the film Divorcing Jack, the first full-length feature, as its BBC makers insist, to be filmed exclusively in Northern Ireland. For security reasons other films dealing with the period of the Troubles couldn't be fully shot in the North.
It's something the city badly needs, a touch of glitz and glamour. Actors such as Adrian Dunbar, Ian McElhinney, Charlie Lawson - aka Jim McDonald, of Coronation Street infamy - and David Thewlis, will be fraternising with Belfast's great, good and disreputable.
However, one of its stars, John Keegan, who plays a priest in this rather manic film about the North's paramilitary, criminal and political lowlife, will be absent. He will be remembered by his many friends at the premiere in the Virgin Cinema on the Dublin Road in Belfast and afterwards at a top-class hooley at the Ormeau Road Gallery.
The night will be an emotional one for John's wife, Sherrie. Last Saturday week she sailed into the choppy Atlantic waters off Co Donegal to carry out his final wishes, to scatter his ashes into the deep water under the towering cliff-face of Slieve League. "I told him that I didn't like sailing, that I always got sick, but he just smiled and said: `Well, you'll just have to cope'."
So, she did. "It was his favourite place in the world," Sherrie recalled. "It was very scary, and also very emotional, but I'm glad I was able to do it. John didn't like being kept in a box."
Anybody who crossed the path of the actor John Keegan agrees that he was a free spirit, a person who loved life, and, when he saw it being taken away from him, learned to cope, just as Sherrie has had to cope without him. Theirs was a special loving relationship, in good times and in hard times.
They knew each other for seven years. Sherrie, a theatre costumier, saw him in a Druid play in Galway and, pretty assertive herself, made it her business to get to know him. The first five years of their relationship were hectic and exciting. The last two were difficult and straining, but ultimately rewarding and loving, as they confronted the cancer that took John's life in February this year. He was 48.
Two weeks before his death he travelled to Dublin for the premiere of The Boxer, for which Barry McGuigan was a consultant.
"Most of the time he spent chatting with Barry and his wife, Sandra, reassuring them about his daughter, who has leukaemia. That was the nature of him," recalled the Belfast-based actress Eleanor Methuen, another of John's chaotic and boisterous circle of friends.
Separately, Sherrie and John travelled to London to participate in seminars organised by the Gift of the Heart organisation. The seminars help those with life-threatening illness and their primary carers confront and overcome their many problems. "They provided us with a source of strength and comfort, and allowed us to value every day as it comes," said Sherrie.
"We found it a freeing experience, we could address the feelings of powerlessness, isolation and despair which place an intolerable strain on an already emotionally charged situation," she added.
The proceeds from Thursday's premiere will go to the John Keegan Trust to help Sherrie stage Gift of the Heart seminars in Northern Ireland. Film tickets are £50 a head, and include post-reception buffet, drinks and music. Some are still available from the Northern Ireland Film Commission, telephone Belfast 232444.