History, it is said, is written by the victors. But who gets to make the movie? The past 12 months have seen much ill-informed comment and debate about the perceived "inaccuracy" or bias of a range of films set against historical backdrops: Pearl Harbor; The Patriot; U-571 . . . The fact is that none of these films has anything much to tell us about the periods in which they are set, but they do tell us quite a lot about the time in which they were made (most of it pretty depressing).
The same is true, albeit on a much smaller scale, of Irish films.
At the Galway Film Fleadh recently, two films on very similar subjects received their Irish premiΦres. H3, directed by Les Blair and written by former republican prisoners Laurence McKeown and Brian Campbell, is a fictionalised dramatisation of the events between the ending of the first, aborted hunger strike in 1981 and the death of Bobby Sands. Writer-director Maeve Murphy's Silent Grace is a fictionalised account of the experiences of republican women prisoners in Armagh Prison during the same period.
In addition, there are currently two dramas in post-production re-enacting the events of Bloody Sunday. Thus, the two traumatic events through which Irish nationalism/republicanism defines itself as the wronged and suffering party in the Northern Ireland conflict will be well-represented on screen by the end of this year.
The thousands of other victims of the violence are unlikely to have their stories told. This fact is likely to be pointed out in those sections of the media which will see both films as republican propaganda. However, the reality is more complex: H3 is an unabashedly republican perspective on the events of 1981, told almost exclusively from the prisoners' point of view; Silent Grace, in the words of Maeve Murphy, "points to the victory of humanism against a backdrop of intransigence on all sides".
H3 and Silent Grace are relatively low-budget affairs, shot on spartan sets with little-known actors. Despite their respective merits, the reality is that they will struggle to reach an audience outside the arthouse circuit (which in Ireland is limited to Dublin, Cork and Belfast). Both stories are powerfully told and well worth seeing, but they raise the question: where are the films which represent the other experiences and other communities in Northern Ireland?
"What intrigued me in the script was not that this was the chance to make a film about a piece of history," says Les Blair. "It was the opportunity to make a film about a community. Also, the detail of how you survive in that kind of extreme situation. The thing that intrigued me was that here was a bunch of so-called hard men, so-called terrorists who were behaving to each other with incredible sympathy and understanding, who in their behaviour to each other were actually more feminine, because of the will to understand which seemed to be the basis on which that community operated. It was democratic emotionally as well as politically.
"I would be probably politically in sympathy with the prisoners," says Blair. "I'm a republican, I want a republic in Britain, so I have no argument with that. But that's not where I came from in terms of the film. Where I came from was from an interest in the drama and the story."
Co-screenwriter Laurence McKeown spent more than 70 days on hunger strike during the protest; he survived because his mother intervened once he had gone into a coma. Since his release from prison in 1992, he has been working as a writer and development worker in Belfast, as well as co-founding the West Belfast Film Festival (now the Belfast Film Festival), which he currently chairs. Having taken his BA from the Open University while in prison, he went on to do a PhD in sociology at Queen's (where his thesis was on "Unrepentant Fenian Bastards: The Social Construction of an Irish Republican Prisoner Community").
"Anything I've read in the abundance of literature and drama on this subject has characters who don't relate in any manner to people I've known or the community I know. It's all been part of a pattern - which was the political endgame - which was to portray people as mad or killers or whatever, rather than understanding the issues. People now look back on the hunger strike as a turning-point for that."
Actually, republican mad dogs have been pretty thin on the ground in movies of the past 10 years, with the exception of a couple of risible Hollywood hack jobs (Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away and Sean Bean in Patriot Games being the worst offenders). And even those farragos have taken pains to establish their villains as being "renegade" republicans.
As an example of film-makers taking dramatic license with the truth, McKeown points to the IRA character in In the Name of the Father who sets a prison officer on fire.
The moment when Hollywood was willing to finance major movies on the subject of the conflict appears to have passed for good, following the failure of Neil Jordan's Michael Collins and Jim Sheridan's The Boxer at the US box office. The past five years have seen a number of smaller films set in the North which have addressed the issues more obliquely. A mini-wave of comedies - Divorcing Jack, An Everlasting Piece, the soon-to-be-released The Most Fertile Man in Ireland - have attempted to satirise sectarian divisions, with mixed results commercially and critically.
"In terms of that question of balance, for me, yes, there is a war and there are two different sides," says McKeown. "But one side is fighting from a position of domination, and the other from one of liberation. Very little has come out from the other side, and I personally would like to see more, but then the question arises of how do you tell a story from that side, which is about domination, about killing Catholics and trying to maintain a status quo? Where's the good story in there? It's a totally different story, about people who are very confused about where they are, who feel that they've lost something, and that they've been used by unionist politicians."
Which raises the question of whether "the good story" as defined by McKeown is what any film-maker should really be looking for - his definition of the loyalist story actually sounds much more interesting and complex. H3 is an accomplished, emotionally powerful drama, but its ideological parameters are dramatically limiting. The film's depiction of the prison officers, for example (with the exception of one sketchily drawn character who shows some moral qualms about what's going on) is as one-dimensional as any anti-Provo caricature from the other side. Whereas Silent Grace goes to some pains to contextualise prison officers' brutality against the backdrop of the assassination campaign which was being waged against their co-workers, this is barely hinted at in H3.
For McKeown, the hunger strikes happened because "the British government decided it was going to class people as political prisoners and deny political realities. Space only opened up when it was accepted that everyone's politics were legitimate, regardless of where they were coming from. It's interesting how the language has changed. Prisoners were criminals, murderers, gangsters, whatever . . . all that language which was introduced by the British government in 1976".
But it's possible to agree that demonisation or criminalisation is unproductive and wrong, without accepting that the alternative is hagiography. The introduction to the programme at the Galway Film Fleadh announced that the films were being shown on the 20th anniversary of the hunger strikes to "honour" the 10 men who died - a politically charged word which, I suggest, elevates the deaths of the hunger strikers above the many others who died during the same period. Who tells their stories?
"I think you're asking that of the wrong people," responds McKeown's co-writer, Brian Campbell. "Because what is our responsibility as writers? It's to be true to ourselves and to look at the world. Obviously there's room for lots of other stories, but we're going to write the ones which are true to us."
This seems a reductionist approach to the possibilities of imaginative fiction and drama, but Campbell is quite right about his own responsibilities. Is there then an onus on the financing bodies which support Irish film production to ensure a broader representation of views and experiences?
"I tend to stay away from the word balance," says Rod Stoneman, chief executive of the Irish Film Board. "Because it's very bogus, especially on television. It has to be something which is good drama. An obvious, perhaps facile point is that conflict does create drama. Most films centre on protagonists rather than passive victims."
Both H3 and Silent Grace were part-funded by the IFB and its Belfast counterpart, the Northern Ireland Film Commission. "In different ways, both when I worked at Channel 4 and now at the Irish Film Board, I have been interested in authentic, direct, textured speech from all communities in Ireland," says Stoneman. "It surprises me that a range of views hasn't emerged. Part of the problem would seem to be the reluctant, introverted natures of some cultures in the North."
He cites playwright Gary Mitchell and screenwriter Daniel Mornin, who wrote Nothing Personal (about a loyalist killing squad in 1970s Belfast), as rare examples of drama coming from "the other side".
"From the point of view of the IFB, there is a desire to see those kinds of stories," Stoneman says.
He points out, though, that the IFB does not initiate projects. "The board is not a pro-active body - maybe it could be in the future, given the resources."
Last month, H3 had its first public screening for an audience of ex-hunger strikers, families and friends. "We were saying it was going to be our most critical audience," says McKeown. "But I have to say it was very emotional; people left sobbing. For Brian and me, these were our peers, and that was very important."
"I think we've made a film which has a kind of accuracy and truthfulness about it," says Blair.
"It is a very specific moment and part of the struggle. But what we've made is a feature film, and it's a story told from a point of view, like all good stories."
H3 is released in late September. As part of the Galway Arts Festival, Lawrence McKeown, H3 co-screenwriter and a former IRA hunger striker who spent 72 days without food, is joined in discussion by a panel of political commentators at An Taibhdhearc today at 2 p.m. Admission is free.