This powerful, elegiac documentary focuses on a monumental chronicle of 3,700 lives ended by violence in Northern Ireland
Few films released in 2019 have seemed as timely or as urgent as Lost Lives. Documentarists Michael Hewitt and Diarmuid Lavery have come up with an immensely powerful film about a remarkable artefact: a thumping chronicle written over seven years that stands as an obituary of 3,700 lives taken during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Hewitt and Lavery pull a scene-setting example from the book’s first pages: nine-year-old Patrick Rooney, killed in his bed by an Ruc bullet during a riot in August 1969. In the film’s final moments, they add the name of Lyra McKee, the journalist shot by dissident Republicans during rioting in April 2019. Entry by entry, the film constructs a sorrowful history of promise extinguished and offers a pointed reminder of what lurks behind any rollback of the Good Friday agreement.
Few films released in 2019 have seemed as timely or as urgent as Lost Lives. Documentarists Michael Hewitt and Diarmuid Lavery have come up with an immensely powerful film about a remarkable artefact: a thumping chronicle written over seven years that stands as an obituary of 3,700 lives taken during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Hewitt and Lavery pull a scene-setting example from the book’s first pages: nine-year-old Patrick Rooney, killed in his bed by an Ruc bullet during a riot in August 1969. In the film’s final moments, they add the name of Lyra McKee, the journalist shot by dissident Republicans during rioting in April 2019. Entry by entry, the film constructs a sorrowful history of promise extinguished and offers a pointed reminder of what lurks behind any rollback of the Good Friday agreement.
- 10/16/2019
- by Mike McCahill
- The Guardian - Film News
Footage from Dermot Lavery and Michael Hewitt’s “Lost Lives” offers a glimpse of some of the victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland, known in Britain and Ireland simply as “the Troubles.”
The nonfiction film has its world premiere at the London Film Festival on Thursday. It has a roster of big-name Irish actors narrating, including Kenneth Branagh, Adrian Dunbar, Brendan Gleeson, Susan Lynch and Liam Neeson.
The film project is based on the book of the same title, which was written over seven years by five journalists. They set out to record the circumstances of every single death in the conflict, which was formally ended by the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, although violence has occasionally flared since. The book has 3,700 entries. The final one is for Lyra McKee, a journalist fatally shot in 2019.
Lavery and Hewitt describe the project not as a documentary but “a filmic response to the book.
The nonfiction film has its world premiere at the London Film Festival on Thursday. It has a roster of big-name Irish actors narrating, including Kenneth Branagh, Adrian Dunbar, Brendan Gleeson, Susan Lynch and Liam Neeson.
The film project is based on the book of the same title, which was written over seven years by five journalists. They set out to record the circumstances of every single death in the conflict, which was formally ended by the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, although violence has occasionally flared since. The book has 3,700 entries. The final one is for Lyra McKee, a journalist fatally shot in 2019.
Lavery and Hewitt describe the project not as a documentary but “a filmic response to the book.
- 10/10/2019
- by Stewart Clarke
- Variety Film + TV
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