On These Grounds, 2015, 69 minutes

By Jean Rasenberger

 "What can we revolt against if power is vacant and values corrupt?" she asks. Not only is political revolt mired in compromise among parties whose differences are less and less obvious, but an essential component of European culture—a culture of doubt and criticism—is losing its moral and aesthetic impact."

Intimate Revolt, by Julia Kristeva (2003)

Why look at a film about a closed prison in Northern Ireland? Even one that played a significant role in the Conflict (or Troubles if you are British), that became a 30-year war, 1968-1998. On These Grounds (2015) addresses the Conflict that grew out of a long history of Irish fighting for independence from centuries of British colonial rule. Isn't this a story dead and gone? One that people who lived at the time may be trying to forget and younger people may not remember or ever heard of. Yet, the Conflict reflects back to us the momentum of 1968 - the radical social and political changes that grew out of that time – through to 1998, when the IRA and the British agreed to a permanent cease-fire, which fell, ironically, just after Bin Laden's first Fatwa against the west. In 2024, what does revolt even mean?

The H-Blocks prison, located just outside of Belfast, was built by the British in the 1970s to house the mounting number of Irish Republican young men arrested. Initially, they were held as political prisoners, but they were sentenced as common criminals. Battles were fought inside using the only weapon they had, their bodies. The men staged protests ranging from the refusal to wear the prison uniform, the refusal to wash, and tragic hunger strikes. The prisoners were primarily teenagers when they entered the prison and, upon their release in the late '90s and early 2000s, were middle-aged men. On These Grounds considers how histories are shaped through the testimony of its witnesses, in this case, the ex-prisoners. After the revolts and protests, after prison, what remains? What is the psychic toll on the survivors?

 Rasenberger was one of the first 'outsiders' permitted into the closed H-Blocks, and the Northern Irish remand jails such as Crumlin Road Jail in Belfast. The British prison authorities granted her access to the buildings and grounds on the condition she would not interview any ex-inmates there. So, of course, she immediately asked some former Irish Republicans to join her, recording their stories as they wandered through the cells, yards, and underbellies of the prisons, sharing memories that were perhaps their own, or part of the dominant narrative that Irish Republicans (the IRA?) wanted shaped.