In March, 1981, in Northern Ireland's notorious Maze Prison, twenty one IRA prisoners went on a hunger strike hoping to force the Thatcher government to recognise them as political prisoners and not common criminals. Some seven months later ten men were dead. The other eleven were saved through the intervention of their respective families who, against their sons' wishes, gave the authorities permission to feed them intravenously. Written by director Terry George and Jim Sheridan, the creative team behind In The Name Of The Father, Some Mother's Son is a stark, wrenching journey into the hearts and minds of the ordinary Irish mothers and daughters who found themselves confronted by a harrowing moral and emotional nightmare. Resisting the temptation to push a partisan line or engage in facile moralising, the film reaches behind the headlines and the statistics to graft a human face on the innocent victims of a conflict where the single common denominator attendant to the rabid rank and file on both sides of the barricades was the cockamamie belief that their ongoing barbaric handiwork was somehow sanctioned by God himself. Helen Mirren and Fionnula Flanagan are superb in the key roles.
