Irish 1847 famine, new film

This August 2018 video says about itself:

BLACK 47 Official Trailer (2018) Hugo Weaving, James Frecheville

Movie in theatre 5 September 2018.

By Joanne Laurier at the Toronto International Film Festival in Canada, 1 October 2018:

Black 47

Irish writer-director Lance Daly’s Black 47 is set during the Great Famine that ravaged Ireland in the late 1840s (the title refers to 1847, a particularly devastating and deadly year).

Australian actor James Frecheville plays an Irish deserter from the British army, Martin Denny, who returns to his homeland to discover that his mother has died of starvation and his brother was hanged by the British.

Witnessing the horrors afflicting the population, Denny, a highly skilled killing machine, embarks on a mission to avenge his family. In response, the British occupiers send a posse to kill Denny, led by Hannah (Hugo Weaving), one of Denny’s disgraced former army comrades. The convoy also includes the cruel, resolute English officer, Pope (Freddie Fox), as well as a young private, Hobson (Barry Keoghan), who becomes deeply affected by the suffering of the Irish people. Along the way, the trio pick up a devious local translator, Conneely (Stephen Rea)—“Maybe people would place more value on beauty if they could eat it.”

The landscape is a mass of blight, disease and starvation, with the British army doing its best to impose a death sentence on the population. A showdown between Denny and his trackers culminates on the property of Lord Kilmichael (Jim Broadbent), who is hoarding large quantities of grain to ship to England, even as famished throngs bang on the gates of his lavish estate.

Black 47 is a well-executed film, though it tends to divide the world into “good guys” and “bad guys”, like a stereotypical cowboy movie or a mere revenge thriller.

According to BBC History: “Altogether, about a million people in Ireland are reliably estimated to have died of starvation and epidemic disease between 1846 and 1851, and some two million emigrated in a period of a little more than a decade (1845-55). Comparison with other modern and contemporary famines establishes beyond any doubt that the Irish famine of the late 1840s, which killed nearly one-eighth of the entire population, was proportionally much more destructive of human life than the vast majority of famines in modern times.”

Teeth offer vital clues about diet during the Great Irish Famine: here.