Lost Lives

It has been over 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed. I doubt the impact of the Troubles will ever disappear from my psyche.

I was born after it started but Northern Ireland was on the news each day as I was growing up. Luck determined that I only skirted around the atrocities. A wrong turn and a traffic jam meant that one afternoon I did not end up in a place where an IRA bomb went off.

Lost Lives is a documentary from Michael Hewitt and Dermot Lavery. It is based on a book written over seven years. A monument to the dead, an obituary of 3700 lives taken during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Narrated by various Irish actors. It is accompanied by scenes of archive news footage as well scenes of the Irish landscape.

The first story is of 9 year old Patrick Rooney killed by a stray bullet by a RUC patrol during riots in 1969. The harrowing stories are those of children. A baby who died from a bullet, a boy blown up by a landmine. One schoolboy was brutally abducted and shot dead, he was neither Catholic or Protestant. He was Jewish who had relatives that perished in Hitler's concentration camps. Two young men were killed for going out with Catholic girls. No one is sure who was responsible for their deaths.

Lost Lives is not an easy watch even though it only highlights just 18 of the lives taken. At times the footage of the natural world was incongruous, the final scene of a woman giving birth sat uneasily with me.

The end credits lists the name of all the people who died during the Troubles. They go past the years after The Good Friday Agreement.

The book on which this film is based is simple, elegant and worthy.

The film misunderstands those concepts and attempts to be 'worthy' through long lingering shots of nothing, sad dramatic music, slow motion symbolic footage.

It doesn't work. It's terrible. This doesn't remember the lost lives, this seeks to wallow in pity for them. That's not worthy. This film is not worthy. Buy the book instead.

Having lived through all of this (only just), this is a heartbreaking documentary which depicts the futility of this conflict. Yes, we don't always agree, yes, we may have very different visions of the future, but do we really gain anything by murdering each other? "Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" Let's hope not.