Bobby Sands: 66 Days is a sharp new documentary about the IRA hero’s world-gripping 1981 hunger strike and how it encapsulated the feverish passions of the Protestant-Catholic “Troubles.”

It’s playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

Northern Ireland was still convulsing after years of strife. As Byrne’s dense weave of televisual archive footage shows, the form of battle ranged from peaceful marches to assassinations and running street skirmishes pitting gangs of rock- and Molotov cocktail-armed Catholic youth against British soldiers and a primarily Protestant police force. But for a few details, the footage of a city in free-fall could have been shot anywhere from Berlin circa 1945 to Aleppo today: children playing in burnt-out cars and rubble-strewn fields, the few standing walls covered in political graffiti…

Here’s the trailer: