Black 47: History Written - Or Rather Resurrected - By Principled Filmmakers

A simultaneously visceral, potent excursion into a buried, brutal history of the past, and as timely and familiar as the injustices going down in the world today, Black 47 both spotlights the horrors of colonialism inflicted on Ireland in 1847 and way beyond, during Britain's genocidal Great Hunger famine back then. And that inevitably mirrors the continuing imperialist global repression - and rage - in our present time.

Irish writer/director Lance Daly has crafted his poetic, visually haunting and melancholy yet somehow defiantly triumphant historical epic as that most brilliantly adapted form of classic storytelling, the western. While at the same time reinventing that bleak axiom: history is written - or rather courageously resurrected - by principled filmmakers.

James Frecheville is Fenney, a despondent Irish deserter from the British army following combat in Afghanistan and for an incomprehensible cause, clearly consumed with PTSD. Upon his return, Fenney is confronted with the ravages inflicted on Ireland by the British, a destroyed land and people succumbing to oppression, hunger, disease, death, eviction and homelessness - masses left in desperation to die along the roads of the countryside. Along with forced Protestant religious conversions by clerics withholding soup from the starving, while existing laws forbid recourse through fishing or hunting.

And in a remarkable dramatic eloquence transforming Fenney's confounded senselessness of war into determined righteous rebellion however wordless (in a subtitled film primarily spoken in the Gaelic language, suppressed as well by the occupying British), the likewise veteran of foreign wars pursuing him (Hugo Weaving), may have more of an insurrectionary bond with his prey, than as predator. Culminating in a mass uprising of politically awakened people, reclaiming their confiscated food stolen for export.

And in a barbaric occupation as the British seize the farmlands and harvests for export to feed England instead, while leaving the Irish to die from starvation as potatoes, the only crop they've been allowed to consume, is destroyed by blight. As scenes of British gentry seizing the land for themselves and demolishing homes, cannot but conjure those war crimes against humanity today in Palestine. And with clear implications as to why Ireland has voted to boycott goods from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, the first EU nation to do so.

Black 47 is currently the highest grossing film in an Ireland clearly euphoric over the long overdue commemoration of their both tragic and triumphant history. And that will surely have politically conscious implications for the human sting of suppression, outrage and rebellion in movie theaters everywhere else.

Prairie Miller