This powerful, elegiac documentary focuses on a monumental chronicle of 3,700 lives ended by violence in Northern Ireland
Few films released in 2019 have seemed as timely or as urgent as Lost Lives. Documentarists Michael Hewitt and Diarmuid Lavery have come up with an immensely powerful film about a remarkable artefact: a thumping chronicle written over seven years that stands as an obituary of 3,700 lives taken during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Hewitt and Lavery pull a scene-setting example from the book’s first pages: nine-year-old Patrick Rooney, killed in his bed by an RUC bullet during a riot in August 1969. In the film’s final moments, they add the name of Lyra McKee, the journalist shot by dissident
Republicans during rioting in April 2019. Entry by entry, the film constructs a sorrowful history of promise extinguished and offers a pointed reminder of what lurks behind any rollback of the Good Friday agreement.