The Wind that Shakes the Barley

I've recently watched Ken Loach's The wind that shakes the barley and it has shocked me and ashamed me. It has shocked me cause the story is so powerful, gripping and emotive, it's a real piece of art. There are few films that have made such an impression on me, I can think of Gattaca, Incendies... It has ashamed me because it has taken me 14 years to watch it, and because it has reminded me again how many essential parts of world's history remain unknown to me.

The story in the film is of particular interest these days, as due to the recent elections in Ireland and the important change in the power balance, with the Sinn Feinn winning the elections in votes, newspapers have been mentioning the Irish Independence War and the Irish Civil War, and how this latter still plays an important role in current politics, with allegiances that still today are inherited from those times. I think the Irish Civil war is a rather unknown conflict to outsiders, particularly if we compare it to the Spanish Civil War. It's normal, the Irish one was a local conflict, with a "relatively low" number of casualties, while the Spanish one had an international involvement as one initial step of the global war against fascism that would be unleashed immediately, caused the almost destruction of a society, and had as aftermath a dictatorship that oppressed Spaniards for 40 years. All this said, there's an element of brutality in the Irish conflict that I think we don't see in the Spanish one, people that months before had risked their lives together sharing common hopes and a common enemy, suddenly found themselves on different sides shooting each other...

I think an accurate word to define this film is brutal. First we have the terrible violence exerted by the British soldiers and their enormous despite for the Irish population. Then the strict treatment of the Irish revolutionaries to their traitors, and finally, the devastating part, the violence between brothers in arms (and real brothers) during the civil word between those that accepted the "partial independence" treaty with the British and those that rejected it, aiming for full independence, a reunified Ireland and a socialist state.

The films has also confronted me with how much I've changed in these years. If I had watched this film at the time of its release, I'm pretty sure the radical leftist that I was would have totally sided with the anti-treaty side, now, this "almost conservative", law abiding citizen that I am, understands pretty well the pro-treaty side.

When I travel somewhere I try to read as much as possible about the history of that place and watch some related movies, so bearing in mind that I was in Ireland for a few days in 2007, it feels really odd to me that I had not watched this film and had almost forgotten about the Irish Civil War. At that time I was really busy at work with a project that we had to have ready, so I guess I had not much time to do "my homework".