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Rating: "Arduous it was for words of sorrow to take shape,
break the bonds that bind us.
But even more arduous to bear the disgrace
of foreign chains that bind us.
And so I said: I will seek the valley in the mountain
early in the morning to join the courageous united men,
while sweet winds shake the barley" (Robert Dwyer Joyce).
Ken Loach's wind caresses the blood-soaked grass of the Irish partisans of the 1920s, during the struggle for independence first and the civil war that subsequently broke out.
Independence declared by the representatives of Sinn Fein who, democratically elected, had formed the government at home, instead of appearing before the Queen, thereby unleashing the monarchic ire of those who were accustomed to thinking of the island as their property.
The blood of many young men and women, often not even of age, colors the hills and mountains where they seek protection and at the same time prepare resistance, thus fighting the oppressive yoke of English domination perpetrated through the brutal violence of their armed wing, the Black and Tans, with such cruelty that it amazed Goebbels himself, who even convinced himself to produce a film on the subject, albeit with clear anti-British demagogic intentions.
Freedom is the supreme ideal, for which everything is secondary, love, affection, career, life itself. In the face of achieving independence, there is no torture that holds. No extracted tooth, no torn-off nail or kick in the lower abdomen can dampen the spirit with which one fights for the ideal. The Black and Tans may destroy homes, rape women, torture the old and young, it doesn't matter. The heart of the oppressed will continue to beat with even more vehemence, even after death, until victory.
The film, Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, tells us about the suffering of the populations subjugated by the colonizing tormentors, with all the most ruthless consequences thereof. Sufferings filtered through the actions of two brothers, Damien and Teddy, united in the guerrilla until the declaration by the English in 1921 asserting the country's autonomy under conditions that Damien deemed unacceptable because the agreements excluded Ulster and because, ultimately, they did not achieve the actual republican turn aspired and wanted by the majority of the people.
Teddy, on the contrary, embodied that Ireland which believed that the Republic had to be achieved step by step and through a period of transition and compromises. A common love, but diametrically opposing positions on how to achieve it: to continue in the fight or to come to terms and thus negotiate with the aggressor?
The wind lashes the grassy cloak of the hills in whose land rest the patriots killed for freedom. The same wind that blew over the Italian mountains or that blows among the ruins of the West Bank. The wind that hovers in all those places where the heart will continue to beat ever more strongly and never stop.
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