“This is my favourite weapon – it’s a hatchet. You can use it to disintegrate the head,” says 12-year-old Kevin Barry O’Donnell in the opening scene of Sinead O’Shea’s sobering documentary. As it turns out, wee Kevin Barry also knows his way around a crowbar, and a saw (“this is my torture weapon – I can cut someone’s finger off if they annoy me”), gleefully parading his collection of deadly weapons like a prized box of toys. The camera cuts on his smile.
Writer-director O’Shea takes a stark look at the violent, self-policing community that rules Creggan, a housing estate and “Republican ghetto” in Northern Ireland’s Free Derry, still haunted by the spectre of the Troubles. As title cards interspersed throughout explain, the Good Friday agreement in 1998 hardly signalled the end of the 30-year conflict, with disproportionately high suicide rates and drug abuse dogging the community in the two decades since. It’s with a sense of bitter irony that the film includes archive news footage of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair visiting in 1995 and declaring Derry “a peaceful city”.
Executive-produced by The Act of Killing’s Joshua Oppenheimer and shot over a five-year period, the film begins and ends with Majella O’Donnell, a mother of two who, as its title announces, brings one of her sons to be shot. In fact, this title is a bit of a red herring; O’Shea uses the (non-fatal) shooting as a starting point rather than a bloody climax. Over drone footage of Creggan at night, Majella describes dropping off her eldest son Philip “Philly” O’Donnell to receive a pre-arranged “punishment shooting” for dealing drugs. Philly, a twentysomething addict, still contests the charge levied at him by “the Ra”, a local mafia of dissident armed Republicans.
Stepping in to mediate between the Ra and the individuals judged to be a problem is Hugh Brady, a slippery former IRA member turned go-between and “a fatalist” by his own admission. “Our community will never expel armed Republicans – it’s still seen as informing,” he says.
For the O’Donnells though, the stakes are different. O’Shea’s interviews with the family show Majella grappling with her guilt as the increasingly isolated Philly experiences the after-effects of this trauma. Paranoid and suicidal, he hasn’t been as far as the cornershop alone in years. “Head’s not the same,” he mutters. The cops, he says, are working with the Ra. And as for Brady, who flatly tells O’Shea that if it takes “a fright” for the antisocial Kevin Barry to wise up, he’d be happy? As Kevin Barry puts it later: “Are you mad? Men turning up at our door with AK-47s? Yeah, that’s a fright.”
Though O’Shea’s diary-like voiceover should create a sense of intimacy and introduce her as a character within her own film, there’s never the sense that she has a real stake in this community as the tone of the reportage wavers between personal and journalistic. Still, it’s a good story. With its climate of corruption and simmering violence, the community has a kind of Italian mob atmosphere, though O’Shea is careful to emphasise its Irishness, using close-ups of Celtic crosses and embroidered tributes to Bobby Sands (and, er, three separate scenes of Majella making chips in a deep fat fryer) to signal the O’Donnells’ national pride.
O’Shea is more cautious when it comes to politics, preferring not to ask her subjects questions about what it actually means to call oneself a nationalist. Still, by including conversations with local activist (and later, independent councillor) Darren O’Reilly, whose campaign involves a megaphone that shoutily asks “Why should all the jobs be in Belfast?”, as well as a closing image of the locals burning Union Jack flags, the impending threat of Brexit (and its impact on the Good Friday agreement) looms.
