A timely new documentary reminds us of the price of peace in Northern Ireland

Never was a movie’s message more urgent, its timing more fortuitous, than Lost Lives. And yet there was only a handful of people in the cinema where I saw it last week. But I’m sure I was not the only one who left the auditorium knowing that what we had seen could not be more relevant, more timely, or more crucial.

Lost Lives is a documentary, brought to the screen by Michael Hewitt and Dermot Lavery, based on a book of the same name that documents the 3,700 people who died in the Troubles. It is, in effect, a series of obituaries, interspersed with contemporaneous footage of the terror and current film contrasting the natural beauty of Northern Ireland.

I was a child growing up in Manchester when the Troubles broke out in 1969; later, in the early 1980s, I reported from Belfast and Antrim and met members of the peace community at Corrymeela. Yet the sheer horror of the stories documented in Lost Lives, the depth of the tragedies, the waste and the desolation, left me reeling.