THIS piercing and unforgettable documentary chronicles the story of Bobby Sands, the IRA volunteer who in March 1981 began a hunger strike that would last an astonishing 66 days and eventually end in him losing his life, as he fought to be officially recognised as a political prisoner.
His tale has been told on screen before, most notably in director Steve McQueen’s Hunger, starring Michael Fassbender. But while that focused almost exclusively on the horrendous suffering of Sands within his H-Block cell, this documentary 35 years after his life ended takes a more all-encompassing approach.
It starts out with news reports of his death before going back through his debilitating journey of starvation protests and putting it into the framework of The Troubles.
It’s an essential watch; as an attention-grabbing reminder, as a fresh and thorough exploration for those that either lived through The Troubles or have an active interest in it and finally as a comprehensive introduction for anyone who happens to be unfamiliar with the details.
Veteran documentarian Brendan J Byrne utilises an effective, potent mix of archive footage and a wide variety of interviews with everyone from teammates in his football team to an Irish Times reporter and representatives of Sinn Féin, each adding layers and context to what happened and how. It certainly doesn’t shy away from showing the devastating effects of the IRA’s actions.
This is all potently interspersed with a dramatised re-enactment of Sands’ time starving in prison and a voiceover by Belfast actor Martin McCann that reads out the startling, poetic words of his diary. “If I die, God will understand… I console myself with the fact that I’ll get a great feed up above, if I’m worthy,” is just one of the powerful entries.
There’s also a fascinating exploration of the action of hunger striking itself, not just how it fits into the narrative of the historical Irish struggle and what it means as a symbolic act but also the physical process – in other words what Sands’ body would have gone through at the various stages of starvation that in his case is backed up by the principle that, “it’s not those who inflict the most suffering but those that can suffer the most that will win”.
Though he was far from the first prisoner to commit such a stark act of personal defiance, others even suffered at the same time as him, the documentary fascinatingly looks at how it helped mythologise him as a hero in his homeland. It seeks to shed new light on a decades-old, very complex political and violent conflict and pulls off that mammoth task with aplomb.
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