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This film tells the story of Bloody Sunday in just one day from dawn till dusk, from the arrival of thousands of troops on the streets of the besieged city to the violent collision between soldiers from the crack Paratroop Regiment and the crowds of civilian demonstrators. The film follows the British soldiers and the police, as well as civilians from both sides of the religious sectarian divide. It focuses in particular on the stories of four men: Ivan Cooper, an idealistic Civil Rights leader, a Protestant in the Catholic camp who shares Martin Luther King’s dream of peaceful change; Gerry Donaghy, a 17 year old Catholic rebel, who yearns to settle down and marry his Protestant girlfriend, but who is drawn into violent confrontation with the soldiers; Brigadier Patrick MacLellan, the commander of the British Army in Londonderry who is under pressure to take firm action to stop the march; and a young private, a radio operator in the Paras, who is ordered, with his unit of hardened veterans, into the Bogside. Bloody Sunday is a war film about the struggle for peace. Shot in a vivid, ultra-realistic style, on the streets and amongst the crowds, in the command posts and in the alleyways, with the stone-throwers and the activists, the generals and the private soldiers. In its extremely focused time-frame but epic scale, the film is an emotional roller-coaster, an intense, unblinking “Battle of Algiers” for Northern Ireland: a portrait of the collision between the unstoppable force and the immovable object that is the 700 year conflict between Britain and Ireland. It is also, in the confrontation between a powerful army and a besieged and rebellious city, a timeless and universal story with echoes across the globe and throughout history from the siege of Troy to the Arab Israeli conflict. |
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