Make-up movies

I don’t think I’ve been to a film since I was in the states. This week I saw three.

Tuesday I saw Black 47, which takes place in 1847 Connemara during the famine. It is in reality a western, with a soldier returning to Ireland to take bloody revenge against the rent collectors and landowners and Irish constabulary who wiped out his family. It puts in stark relief the inhumanity of English colonialism in Ireland. And the contempt of the English for the starving Irish--whom it blamed for their plight.

On Wednesday, I saw Cold War, a tragic love story, with each turn in the plot driven by the political tension between Soviet-ruled Poland and the West. Afterward, we went to Ann’s for dinner. During which I felt my head tightening and my energy dropping. I dragged myself home and slept for 12 hours.

I spent Thursday laying around doing a whole lot of nothing. I watched The Ballymurphy Precedent, a shocking documentary about what happened when a British paramilitary organisation trained in guerrilla fighting was let loose in a poor Catholic neighbourhood. In August 1971, its snipers shot and killed 13 residents of Ballymurphy. The priest who went to help a man who had been shot. The priest waved a white handkerchief, to no avail. The mother of eight who went to help two shot men. None of the victims were armed or involved with the IRA. The paratroopers were just venting anger at the IRA, which had conducted an intense bombing campaign during the previous year, killing British soldiers. It is a shocking chapter in The Troubles. A cursory inquest was done in 1972. Witnesses in the area weren’t interviewed. The Ballymurphy families are fighting for a second, proper inquest.

One of the paratroopers commented that if a proper inquest had been held, Bloody Sunday in Derry could have been prevented. In that rampage by British forces, 28 were shot, half of them fatally. I think there have been three inquests/commissions/reports on Bloody Sunday. It was only the third that wasn’t a white wash of the army’s role.
9-11 to 9-13