The writer of a film about the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry's Bogside thirty years ago said yesterday that he hoped the film Sunday would become a requiem for the dead.
Jimmy McGovern, who also wrote the highly acclaimed Hillsborough documentary and who co-wrote Dockers, which dealt with the Liverpool dockers' strike, said after yesterday's press preview of Sunday that the four years he had spent writing the script were "four years of a moral dilemma".
The film, which will be screened on Channel 4 on January 28th, views the events of the killings of 13 civilians in the Bogside from the point of view of Leo Young, whose brother John (17) was one of the victims.
Mr Young, who went on the march with his two brothers, Patrick and John, said after yesterday's film preview that he didn't know his youngest brother had been killed until two days after the shootings.
"The last words my mother Lily said to me on Bloody Sunday before the march were for me to watch after John.," he said. "During the shootings we became separated and while I was searching for him, I came across the body of Gerry Donaghy.
"I was one of the men who tried to take young Donaghy to hospital, but on the way there we were were stopped by the army and arrested.
"I couldn't believe it when I was told that the army found four nail bombs on his body, because I never saw them and I wouldn't have got into a car with an injured person who was carrying four nail bombs.
"I was arrested, taken to the Strand Road police station and then transferred to Ballykelly army camp. When the Special Branch questioned me they knew John had been killed, but they never told me. Everyone in the camp knew John was dead except me.
"Then two days later I was taken back to Strand Road barracks. No-one knew where I was. My family didn't know where I'd been for two days. As I was leaving Strand Road barracks a detective asked me how many brothers I had. I told him two and he said to me 'You only have one now'.
". . . The film accurately shows me lining up with other people waiting to join the IRA after the funerals, but I couldn't go through with it. I backed out because I knew I couldn't kill, I couldn't do to them what they'd done to us", he said.
Mr McGovern said he expected the film to come in for a lot of criticism in England.