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Written by the Liverpool socialist, Jimmy McGovern, Sunday tells the story of the events of January 30th, 1972 when British Paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed civilians, and wounded a further 15, during an illegal civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland. The day which went on to become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.

The film was commissioned by Channel 4 to be shown on the 30th anniversary of the shootings. In preparation for the film an extensive and wide ranging research interviews were carried out amongst both the families affected by the tragedy and the British paratroopers who fired the bullets. In total more than 100 first hand interviews were recorded, and it is on the basis of that work that Jimmy McGovern wrote his script.

It tells its story through the eyes and emotions of the families of the victims and, more widely, of the Bogside community and then goes on to examine the political conext for ‘Bloody Sunday’, as well as the impact of the first official Government Inquiry into the day itself, conducted by the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, in 1972.

On broadcast the film faced a barrage of criticism from a variety of commentators. The film was one-sided, ran the refrain, depicting the paratroopers as heartless killers, and all of the dead and wounded as innocent victims. And why, they asked, 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?

McGovern answers 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. The film accurately depicts 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.”

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, when he depicts Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath steering Lord Chief Justice Widgery (appointed just two days after the event to conduct a public inquiry) toward the conclusion the British establishment wanted drawn.

Despite all this, 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.

Director: Charles McDougall, Jimmy McGovern
Writers: Jimmy McGovern
Cast: Ciarán McMenamin, Barry Mullan, Paul Campbell
Producer: Gub Neal, Stephen Gargan, Catriona McKenzie
Cinematography: Barry Ackroyd
Music: Adrian Johnston
Production Company: Sunday Productions, Channel 4 Television
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 34mn

Sunday.2002.DVDRip.x264.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 31 min
Size: 	1.24 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	702x576 ~> 998x576
Aspect ratio:  	1.733
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 575 kb/s
BPP: 	0.156
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)
#2:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 161 kb/s (Commentary with writer Jimmy McGovern, director Charles McDougall and producer Stephen Gargan)

https://nitro.download/view/76F3BAFC12F4C6E/Sunday.2002.DVDRip.x264.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/D2CB0C39C1C229F/Sunday.-.The.Debate.2002.DVDRip.x264.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English SDH

The post Charles McDougall & Jimmy McGovern – Sunday (2002) first appeared on Cinema of the World.