The babyish face that we can see under the beret leaves no doubt about the youth of this soldier of the British army, machine gun in evidence, who, astonished, receives from the hands of the woman a biscuit and a cup of tea. These images filmed at the end of August 1969 in a district of Belfast are stunning. As are most of the filmed archives dating from the 1970s and 1980s of this documentary series dedicated to the “Troubles” which, for almost thirty years, bloodied Northern Ireland, causing more than 3,500 victims.
A civil war that does not speak its name. A neighborhood war of astonishing violence which, listening to the numerous witnesses, whether Catholic or Protestant, also caused considerable psychological damage. Carried away in a spiral of violence or simple victims, women and men recount cascading human tragedies.
Author of this documentary series divided into three episodes of almost an hour each, James Bluemel adopts the same formula as two years ago, in 2021, on the occasion of Once Upon a Time in Iraq (a polyphonic story in three episodes recounting the tragedies experienced from 2003 to 2017 in Iraq by civilians, journalists and soldiers).
This time, from Belfast to Derry via small villages, Bluemel plunges us, with filmed archives to support it, into the Irish chaos. Chaos sometimes difficult to understand, as the emotion aroused by the testimonies of former victims, but also of bombers or simple civilians having been present in the wrong place at the wrong time, prevails over historical analysis.
Hunger strikers
Former activists of the Irish Republican Army or paramilitaries of the Ulster Defense Association, former police officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, they recount a period drowned in violence and daily dangers. Former schoolchildren remember the armed patrols responsible for protecting them on the way to school, for the sole reason that the sidewalk opposite belongs to “the other side”. “The horror arrived little by little,” summarizes a woman who recounts with an emotion still perceptible in her voice the arbitrary arrests, the murders at the end of the street.
The second episode, dedicated to the imprisoned hunger strikers, also recalls Margaret Thatcher’s contempt for these republican activists, of whom Bobby Sands, who died after sixty-six days of hunger strike on May 5, 1981, remains the most important symbol. famous. A Bobby Sands whose mother, filmed at the time, recounts with almost chilling dignity the agony of her son in Maze prison. “My son is dying. I ask everyone to remain calm and not cause any riots,” she says, facing the camera.
What is also striking in this documentary is the way in which the cameramen of the time were able to film so closely the police charges, the tense gunfire from the army, the bomb explosions in the shopping streets. Violence is not suggested, it is obvious and hurts.
Then, finally, the peace talks, the promises, the hopes. Last witness interviewed: Richard Moore, from Derry, blinded in 1972 by a gunshot on the way to school. He found the soldier who fired the shot and forgave him. But as he says: “Peace is complicated. »