Lance Daly's harrowing story of revenge and survival during the the Great Famine is out now...
Director: Lance Daly
Starring: James Frecheville, Hugo Weaving, Jim Broadbent
Running time: 100 mins
Black, bleak, brutal and brilliant – the first film ever made for the big screen about the Famine could have been dour and depressing but instead, tells an epic story that smashes all expectations. Black ’47 follows Michael Feeney (James Frecheville), an Irish soldier in the British Army abroad, who returns home to Ireland to find his family have perished; the year is 1847 and Ireland is firmly within the grasp of the Potato Famine. Feeney’s mother has starved to death and his brother was hanged for resisting eviction from his own home. Feeney then goes on to seek vengeance on those responsible for his family’s deaths, and what follows is a powerful revenge-thriller narrative. A disgraced English soldier-turned-policeman named Hannah (Hugo Weaving) is sent after Feeney – the soldier who saved his life during the Afghan war.
Black ’47 is a film that makes no apologies in portraying The Great Hunger not as a famine, but more a genocide on the part of the British. It is visceral and violent, set against the backdrop of barren Connemara, a rural and isolated region in the West of Ireland. With its beautifully stark imagery of foggy Galway, the eerie empty mountains and abandoned cottages capture the amount of death in Ireland at the time.
It forgoes any clichés of both British and Irish people that are often prevalent in big-screen films
Barry Keoghan and Jim Broadbent shine as usual, in their relatively smaller roles. As an Irish-speaker, I was dumbfounded by Aussie-man James Frecheville’s ability to speak the Irish language so accurately, and also his skill in getting the Irish accent in English, to a tee (we’ve had problems with this before… see: Gerard Butler in P.S. I Love You). Frecheville more than fulfils the role of a cold and ruthless Connemara man. The use of the Irish language (subtitled) for an internationally-screened film is daring but means the story feels far more true-to-life and is necessary for parts of the plot. Director Lance Daly pulls this off seamlessly.
Compelling character development and a truly arresting story-line put this film in the ‘must-see’ category for me, not only for Irish people, but anyone with an interest in war-thrillers or famine history. It serves as a pretty accurate crash-course in Irish history – one particularly harrowing scene shows starving Irish people translating their names to English and shunning their religion, in exchange for soup. To this day, many Irish people can tell whether or not their ancestors ‘took the soup’, depending on whether or not their surname is the Irish or anglicized version.
It has been hailed as ‘The Irish Braveheart’ (Mail on Sunday) and I can’t help but agree. Feeney is a badass and I found myself rooting for him right to the end of the film. For a movie that could have been gloomy and heart-breaking, Black ’47 succeeds in making use of wry, dark humour in places. It forgoes any clichés of both British and Irish people that are often prevalent in big-screen films. The ending was harrowing and very much open to interpretation. Black ’47 was an ambitious film, albeit one that needed to be made. It succeeds in what it set out to do – to entertain, to thrill, and to tell a story.
Did you know? The quote from Lord Kilmichael (Jim Broadbent), "there are those who look forward to the day when a Celtic Irishman is as rare in Ireland as a Red Indian in Manhattan", is from a purported editorial in The Times of London written during the famine.
Black '47 is screening at Broadway Cinema until Tuesday 23 October
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