Titanic Town

In Belfast in 1972, at the height of the Troubles, a family that has just moved to Andersonstown watches gun battles from its front window. When a neighbour is shot, Bernie McPhelimy cannot stand it and forms a group of women calling for a ceasefire. The neighbourhood declares her a traitor; the army tries to use her. The film is not interested in taking a political side. It is interested in the impossibility of standing in the middle: Bernie supports neither the IRA nor the army, she wants her children to be able to go outside, and is threatened by both. The family's house becomes a target. The form is realism seen from inside a family: the kitchen, the street, bus stops and period television footage. The violence is in the background and constant. Roger Michell directed, from Mary Costello's novel, which draws on what happened to the author's own mother. It was shot in Northern Ireland. Julie Walters plays Bernie and Ciarán Hinds her husband. Walters' work is what the film rests on; she makes the woman neither a hero nor a victim. Who it is for: viewers who like the history of Northern Ireland and political drama told from inside a family. Who it is not for: anyone unfamiliar with the politics of the period. The film explains no context and assumes you know the divisions.