IT WAS the most deadly case of aviation terrorism before September 11th, 2001, and now the story of the Air India atrocity off the Irish coast is to be told in a documentary to be shown at this year's Corona Cork Film Festival.
All 329 people on board the flight, which was en route from Montreal to Delhi via Toronto and London, died when a bomb ripped through the baggage compartment and the plane disintegrated and disappeared off Irish radar screens on June 23rd, 1985.
Simply titled Air India Flight 182, the 96-minute documentary by Icelandic-born filmmaker Sturla Gunnarson has already received critical acclaim in Canada where it received its world premiere earlier this year. The documentary, which includes poignant footage of the recovery operation off the Co Cork coast and of the bodies being brought into a temporary morgue at Cork University Hospital, was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to examine the atrocity.
Gunnarson, who directed the 2005 adaptation Beowulf & Grendelstarring Gerard Butler, uses a combination of re-enactments, archival footage and interviews with the families who lost loved ones.
"We've heard about it in fragments of personal loss, conspiracy theory, erased surveillance tapes, bungled investigations and cultural divide," Gunnarson said, "but now, after 22 years, three trials and two commissions, a coherent narrative has emerged.
"The time has come to tell this story. I hope this film goes some way towards distilling a very complex story and giving a voice to Air India families who are the most gracious and dignified people I've ever met."
Gunnarson was raised in Canada and is one of the country's most highly regarded maker of documentaries.
Cork Film Festival director Mick Hannigan said he was delighted to have secured the film - which is being screened at the Kino cinema on Sunday, the festival's opening day - for Cork as the story had a particular resonance for so many people from the area who were involved in the recovery operation and who helped to remember the victims with the establishment of a memorial at Ahakista in west Cork.
