It is an understatement to say that Northern Ireland’s woes have posed a challenge to film-makers. The most recent period of violent unrest, the Troubles, persisted over three decades. It was an increasingly squalid, often invisible war fought out between combatants who had become equally morally compromised. The barbaric terrorism of those wishing to overthrow the state and a state response that included collusion with murderous paramilitaries is not the stuff of heroic war movies.
The other problem film-makers faced was that the bloodletting had already been televised, day in, day out, night after night. And as the years went on, with no end in sight to the killing, there were few subjects to make viewers change television channels more quickly than a programme on the seemingly intractable Troubles.
Understandably, most filmmakers shied away from addressing the subject and, as a consequence, there has been little of note on screen. Films such as The Devil’s Own and Prayer for the Dying that tried to give a one-sided heroic narrative were seen for what they were: a comic book response to a complex historical labyrinth. The few that did attempt to show the complexity of the situation (Cal and Hidden Agenda) struggled cinematically as they had too much politics and too little drama.
Nonetheless, there have been some notable exceptions. Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out is a curious, dream-like meditation on the nature of life and death played out against the backdrop of a dying IRA gunman on the run through the streets of Belfast. More a testament to the genius of post-war British cinema than cinéma vérité from Belfast, it nevertheless captures something of the faux romantic root at the core of so much of Ireland’s political violence.
In the early 1980s Harry’s Game was a television drama that, for the first time in relation to Northern Ireland, played out the complexities of the Troubles in a decidedly unromantic fashion, with conflicted loyalties and moral ambivalence at the plot’s centre. Decades after that, Fifty Dead Men Walking proved a brutal, believable thriller. That it worked as a feature film was, no doubt, on account of its basis in fact: namely, the real-life memoirs of a police informant.
A drama about informants pales, however, when placed alongside the latest documentary from Alex Gibney, No Stone Unturned. Its subject matter is the murder of six men at a pub in the village of Loughinisland by Loyalist paramilitaries in 1994 and the allegation of state collusion. No one has been convicted for the deaths.
The film records the pain still felt by the victims’ families. It also documents a shameful combination of inertia and cover-up on the part of those in authority. If No Stone Unturned had been a feature film few would have believed it – or perhaps, given its subject matter, few would have watched it. That Gibney is an Oscar-winning and critically acclaimed director will bring this documentary to a wide audience. The audience knows that what it is seeing on screen is not fiction, but viewers’ initial reaction to things depicted as having happened in our recent history may well be incredulity.
No Stone Unturned is an all-too-real exploration of the murky world of police informants. The relationship between informant and police seemingly endures, even when the authorities are aware that those same informants are murdering their neighbours.
The film produces an alarming account of crucial evidence and forensics either mislaid or destroyed during the course of the murder investigation. Ultimately, it is a damning indictment of state collusion in those murders.
The film goes further, though. It presents the collusion in these deaths as not so much the work of a few rotten apples but as something worryingly endemic. At the end, it names those it says carried out the atrocity. When the alleged murderers are revealed, they are seen freely going about their business – untroubled citizens of the new post-Troubles province.
………
No Stone Unturned will be a revelation to international audiences. But to those who lived through the Troubles, it all looks depressingly familiar. Ultimately, the film’s bleak conclusion is that, some 20 years on, Northern Ireland’s current political settlement is not so much about peace as a division of the spoils; and, therefore, not so much about justice for the families of the still 3,000 unsolved murders as a strong desire from those in power to let sleeping dogs lie. The consequence is an ongoing indifference to victims and their families.
No Stone Unturned is clearly an ironic title; the initial police investigation into the murders was marked by anything but dogged determination. In the end, what this film unearths is that there is, even now, something very rotten in the state of Northern Ireland.
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