theguardian.com – Here is a documentary that needed to be made: a careful, well put together film about the IRA prisoners who went on hunger strike in 1981 to campaign for prisoner-of-war status, led by Bobby Sands, who became a global icon of anti-British protest during the 66-day ordeal which ended in his death and those of his comrades.

This has already been the subject of fiction features such as Terry George’s Some Mother’s Son (1996), Les Blair’s H3 (2001) and Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008), and now there is Brendan Byrne’s documentary: clear-sighted and even-handed, interviewing Sinn Féin figures such as Danny Morrison and Gerry Adams, and also Thatcherite partisans Norman Tebbit and Charles Moore – and not omitting to mention the IRA’s campaign of violence that continued during the hunger strike, involving the murder of a census worker, Joanne Mathers.