If you’re expecting a fiery confrontation, Gerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man might seem restrained. Trisha Ziff, who shot her footage over five years, lets the former president of Sinn Féin reflect on his life and times in a documentary that is rooted in long-form interviews.
Beginning with quiet scenes of Adams walking dogs in the Belfast hills, the film moves through the civil-rights era, internment and the peace process.
He proves a compelling storyteller, recalling vivid details that colour key moments in Irish history. We hear that, during the Provisional IRA’s secret negotiations with Willie Whitelaw, the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland, in 1972, an RAF officer saluted Martin McGuinness – who returned the gesture.
Adams speaks of his political awakening during the housing protests; his first job, in a Protestant bar; and a surprising early sectarian encounter that shook him: being asked by two Catholic boys to recite the Hail Mary.
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He recalls, after being interned without trial at 23, meeting a young Bobby Sands, and the horrors of Long Kesh, where “blanket men” were denied basic sanitation. “It’s hard to describe what it was like to meet a blanket man,” he says, recalling mattresses filled with maggots and nowhere, save walls and doors, to put waste.
Moves towards peace are often undermined from without. He recalls how John Hume was vilified in the southern media after their first meeting. Elsewhere, there is skulduggery: loyalist mobs led by B-specials and various assassination attempts. He survives only because the shooters were inaccurate.
Adams acknowledges some of the suffering the IRA inflicted while emphasising what he believes to have been its achievements: “The IRA did things which should not have been done. But as an organisation – mostly of working-class men and women – who stood up against a compliant media and a compliant government ... [it] deserves huge credit.”
Ziff, a Yorkshire woman who began her career in community film-making in Derry, and is now based in Mexico, has also made documentaries about Che Guevara and the Spanish civil war, with a focus on the imagery they generated.
Gerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man lacks critical voices and may well enrage political opponents. Ziff instead allows Adams to recount his political formation, shaped as it was by violence, loss and a steadfast rejection of British rule in the North. But her direction is elegant and unfussy, backed by exemplary archive footage.
In cinemas from Friday, October 17th
