The Wind That Shakes The Barley

A friend persuaded me to see this film with her yesterday. I wanted to, and didn't. Wanted to, because Ken Loach is brilliant, and his films are necessary and true and beautiful. Didn't want to because they are also gut-wrenching and heartbreaking and grim.

This one was no exception. What I hadn't expected was to see so clearly, so strongly, the parallels between British rule in Ireland and British imperialism in Kenya, in the rest of the British Empire. To hear the Irish nationalists make the connection:

"If the English give us full independence, they'll have every colony from Jamaica to Africa, clamoring for the same!"

Also unexpected was the way the scenes evoked, so powerfully, the present-day atrocities of Israeli occupation in Palestine. The same realities of soldiers pounding down streets, raiding homes and businesses, beating, torturing, killing at will, terrorizing a civilian population to force them to give up the whereabouts of the resistance fighters. I wonder if this film will screen in Israel. And if Israeli audiences will be able to see the brutalities of their state's actions reflected in the story.

Finally, most wrenching of all, the betrayals and splits in the IRA after the treaty with Britain, that kept Northern Ireland a colony. Again, evoking the way newly-independent, post-colonial African governments betrayed the ideals of the freedom struggles.