This week in Northern Slant’s summer series Movies and Shakers, we take a look at a few movies with a political storyline that are specifically set in Ireland or Northern Ireland. Maybe you’ll have seen some of them, maybe not – as always, they’re just recommendations, and there are plenty of other lists of “Irish movies” out there, so as always let us know what your own personal favorites are.

Taking our own situation here and representing an often disputed narrative on the screen can be a tricky task for a filmmaker, whether they’re trying to illuminate a particular truth through a documentary, or, in a drama, holding a mirror up to the society and its people, and letting the reflection fall where it will.

For some impressive episodes of truth-telling, check out the Pull Focus documentary film festival which runs in Belfast next month featuring a selection of films new and not so new, shining a light on issues affecting Ireland; including the short documentary programme on August 12.

One of the most discussed documentaries about the events in our recent history has been last year’s No Stone Unturned, by filmmaker Alex Gibney, about the 1994 Loughinisland massacre.

 

Revisiting history – particularly while it’s still relatively fresh – is always a source of great drama, whether it’s in the relationship between Northern Ireland and Britain, shown in movies like In the Name of the Father (1994) about the Guildford Four, or Hunger (2008) about the hunger strikes. Daniel Day Lewis plays Gerry Conlon and Michael Fassbender plays Bobby Sands respectively. Helen Mirren, meanwhile, stars in another movie about the hunger strikes, Some Mother’s Son (1996) directed by Belfast-born Academy Award-winner Terry George.

 

The same is true of the drama implicit in storytelling around events further back; for example in Ken Loach’s tale of the Irish War of Independence, The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006) or, of course, Neil Jordan’s biopic of Michael Collins from a decade earlier.

 

Jordan’s award-winning 1992 movie The Crying Game is perhaps best known for its now notorious plot twist, but is, above all, an exploration of the complexities of the human condition, regardless of its setting amid the Troubles.

 

Differences between ordinary people in the broader Northern Irish story, as well as reconciliation or lack of it, have always made for good drama – sometimes based in fact, sometimes not; from a movie like Four Days In July by Mike Leigh, made in 1985 and looking at two families whose first children are both born on the Twelfth of July, to Five Minutes of Heaven, a 2009 movie starring Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt extrapolated from an historical incident in 1975.

 

We mentioned earlier that there will always be plenty of lists of movies about Ireland and its recent past, and The British Film Institute recommends “ten great films about the troubles”, including what it says is the “underrated” Titanic Town (1998) in which Julie Walters plays an unexpected peace campaigner.

The on-screen portrayal of Irish folk isn’t exclusively anchored in all-too-depressing reality, of course. Shooting for Socrates (2015) is a relatively entertaining yarn set around how the Northern Ireland football team’s progress at the Mexico World Cup in 1986, and a dream meeting with Brazil, could push the conflict to one side, albeit briefly.

 And reconciliation and personality politics is the theme of our final selection – 2016’s The Journey; a fictionalized account tracing what it took to bring Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness together ahead of the St Andrews Agreement. Despite controversy over the stretching of historical truth in the movie’s premise, there are a couple of notable performances by Tim Spall and Colm Meaney, and a nice Glen Hansard song, Are You Getting Through? on the soundtrack.

Meaney, meanwhile, also starred in 2013’s A Belfast Story, a movie which, according to The Hollywood Reporter “earned minor notoriety in Britain for its promotional press kit, which included a terrorist balaclava and nail-bomb ingredients: an ill-judged publicity stunt for an ill-conceived film.”

So, they might not all hit the target, but there are just a few suggestions – as always, let us know what your favorite political movie about Ireland might be.

And check out the previous installments in the series :

We’ll wrap up in a couple of weeks with a look at political protest songs and videos.

Thanks for watching.

 

 

 

 

Also published on Medium.