SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
In 1972, during a civil rights demonstration in her hometown of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, Geraldine McBride saw her best friends and others killed by British troops - massacre that became known around the world as Bloody Sunday. For two decades, McBride was so traumatized she didn't even tell her children she had witnessed killings. A recent truth commission has prompted McBride to talk more openly, and the release of "Sunday", a new dramatic feature film that screens the next three nights in San Francisco, has further inspired her.

"I'm glad this was made," says McBride, who will attend and answer questions at all three San Francisco showings. "It had to be told because after Bloody Sunday, a lot of young people joined the IRA. There didn't seem to be any justice, and law and order didn't seem to work for our community."

"…The events surrounding Bloody Sunday are still in question, which is why the filmmakers behind "Sunday" spent two years meticulously researching their script, including interviewing British soldiers, medical experts and eyewitnesses such as McBride.

"We had to come up with an unquestionable script because we knew some people wouldn't believe what they saw in it," says Jim Keys, the film's executive producer, who will also attend all three San Francisco screenings. " Anything in the film we can stand behind."

That includes British soldiers - encouraged by superiors - firing on unarmed demonstrators, killing 13 instantly and wounding 15, one of whom died later from his injuries. Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in Northern Ireland's political situation, with reverberations to this day. A British commission known as the Saville Tribunal is conducting its own interviews about the killings and plans to issue a report next year. Key scenes in "Sunday" are based partly on testimony presented to the tribunal, which was created by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998, and to a commission in 1972 known as the Widgery Tribunal that faulted the demonstrators.

For the film, Keys used real footage of the Jan. 30, 1972, protest in Londonderry (also known as Derry) that was taken by William McKinney, a draftsman who was killed that day…In "Sunday", the victims' lives are portrayed from before the day they protest. Keys plays Paddy Doherty, a 32-year-old plumbing apprentice who was killed.

On the day of their demonstration, the marchers are smiling and hopeful that they can over turn British internment laws. After the killings, British troops are shown celebrating in a bar while families of the victims grieve for their losses. The Widgery Tribunal is seen as corrupt, with British soldiers lying under oath.

Key and McBride (who is portrayed in the film) say "Sunday" will remind people of other violent religious conflicts in the world, including the Middle East. They hope that many non Irish people will see "Sunday" during its screenings in San Francisco, and that the movie will eventually be shown by a U.S. television network and picked up for further distribution.

Many documentaries have been made about the incident but "Sunday" is one of the few new dramatic films about that terrible day 30 years ago.

"There's been an overwhelming response to the film," Keys says in a phone interview from Ireland. "The 14 people killed became statistics, and a list of names. We humanize them and tell the consequences of the people who survived. Bloody Sunday was a watershed in British-Irish relations. This is a film about human rights issues." [Top]

Anatomy of a Massacre: (c) 2002 Irish Echo Newspaper Corp. 
'Sunday' depicts Derry tragedy through eyes of the community 
By Eamonn McCann  

"It was done in my name. That's what was different. That's what gave me the right to make this film." 

Thus Jimmy McGovern, Liverpool socialist and self-professed English patriot, responding to a television interviewer who'd challenged his credentials as writer of "Sunday," a two-hour drama about the day in Derry in 1972 when British paratroopers shot dead 14 civil rights marchers and wounded a dozen others. 

"Sunday" is by some distance the best film yet made about the Northern Ireland Troubles, and to be ranked with the best political efforts of modern cinema generally. Don't think "In the Name of the Father." Think "Battle of Algiers." 

The movie is one of two dramas about the Derry massacre released in Britain and Ireland within days of one another in January, marking the 30th anniversary of the killings. 

It tells its story through the eyes and emotions of the families of the victims and, more widely, of the Bogside community. The other production, "Bloody Sunday", written and directed by Paul Greengrass, recounts events as they impacted on the moderate Nationalist politician Ivan Cooper. 

Both films have faced a barrage of criticism from a variety of commentators, some of whom haven't felt it necessary actually to see the dramas before delivering their denunciations -- rather in the way they initially approached Bloody Sunday itself. The films are one-sided, runs the refrain, depicting the paratroopers as heartless killers, all of the dead and wounded as innocent victims. And why, they ask, the continuing concentration on Bloody Sunday, when nobody's made a movie about other atrocities, in some of which just as many people died at the hands of republican or loyalist paramilitaries? Good questions as far as they go, but they don't go close. 

McGovern explains that what drew him to the subject were precisely the things which made Bloody Sunday different, and which gave the day a pivotal significance in the politics of Britain and Ireland. Bloody Sunday wasn't perpetrated by furtive guerrillas lying in wait on a lonely road in the dead of night, but by uniformed agents of the British State in a built-up area on a bright winter's afternoon, witnessed by hundreds who had fled from the hailstorm of bullets into houses and high-rise flats all around. People in the Bogside didn't demand a public inquiry afterward because they wanted to find out the truth but because, knowing the truth, they wanted it acknowledged. 

It was because it wasn't acknowledged, because the truth was whitewashed out of history, the victims demonized and the killers lauded, that young people in Catholic working-class communities across the North saw themselves facing a choice between giving up the fight for equal rights or finding guns and fighting back. Both films accurately depict the mushroom growth of the IRA beginning before the sweet stench of cordite had cleared from lower Rossville Street. 

The strength of McGovern's film lies in the way it shows that the killings hadn't resulted from accident or misunderstanding or because psyched-up soldiers ran amok. The British commander of land forces in the North, Robert Ford, had laid out his intentions in a memo to the general officer commanding three weeks before the slaughter, on Jan. 7, 1972: "I am coming to the conclusion . . . that we must shoot selected ringleaders of the Bogside young hooligans." McGovern puts Ford on screen dictating the memo, then shows him on the ground on the day urging the paras to "Go on . . . go and get them." 

He depicts Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath steering Lord Chief Justice Widgery -- appointed two days after the event to conduct a public inquiry -- toward the conclusion the British establishment wanted drawn. 

…throughout "Sunday", McGovern shows the source of the evil which burst on the Bogside located in the conscious intentions of the British political, military and legal elite. Greengrass's film, on the other hand, suggests a general moral deficiency in the political and security apparatus, implicitly concluding that what the Bogside needed was trust in the leadership of decent men like Ivan Cooper. Contrarywise, McGovern suggests that the answer lies in the potential of the Bogside's sense of working-class oneness and the sheer indomitability of its people to face down the power of the state. 

…the documementary style and the tight emotional focus on one attractive individual make "Bloody Sunday" the more commercial of the two films, but at some cost. In cinema, style can too readily become substitute for truth. Greengrass's cinema verite claim of authenticity is made on behalf of a narrative, which intersects with the truth but doesn't follow its awkward path. Telling the story through Cooper's eyes, Greengrass has to place the former MP at the heart of the action throughout, involved in every key decision. This belittles the role of the mass of the people. The marchers are cast as extras in the drama of the central character's moral dilemma. 

McGovern, meanwhile, based his script on a two-year trawl though thousands of eyewitness statements, published political and military documents and about 100 interviews with civil rights activists from the period and members of the victims' families. There's scarcely a line in his film which isn't taken from life. He concentrates mainly on the family of John Young, 17, who'd worked in a tailor's shop. You get to know the Youngs the way you know people you call in on without knocking the door. Brid Brennan, as John's mother, gives a ferociously understated, shattering performance. 

…the script transcends personal loss and communal grief to tap into the trauma of those who are oppressed and murdered everywhere because seen as enemies of the State. The dilemma presented isn't that of a hero emoting on behalf of the people, but of the plain people themselves torn between a thirst for justice and an instinct for revenge. 

…"Sunday" will make you think deep even as you choke back the tears. It's a wonderful film. Don't miss it. 

Eamonn McCann is an author, socialist, human rights activist and a founder member of Northern Ireland's civil rights movement. He was present at Bloody Sunday on Jan. 30, 1972. 
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