Visualising Peace: Northern Irish Post-conflict Cinema and the Politics of Reconciliation

Abstract

This article seeks to build upon the range of critical work in this area that has identified the unique contours of the Northern Irish settlement and aims to interrogate some areas of policy and practice that encapsulate its contradictions, silences, and ellipses. Following this it will discuss two recent films, Kari Skogland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking (2008), and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Five Minutes of Heaven (2009), that are in different ways shaped by the peace process as a historical event and which grant its abstract negotiations a material form. These films ultimately endorse, albeit in qualified ways, the peace process as it is currently constituted, but they also demonstrate a willingness to explore alternative ways of imagining the post-conflict condition and the relationship to violence that preceded it.