Wonderful documentary about Irish Joe McNally, whose life was marked by the Troubles, the conflict between Protestant loyalists and Catholic republicans.

Belfast's Catholic New Lodge neighborhood was one of the hotbeds of the Troubles, the conflict between Protestant loyalists and Catholic republicans. The conflict ended on paper in 1998, but the wound is far from healed. This documentary follows Joe McNally, who at the age of nine saw his uncle kidnapped. Six months later, he threw his first gasoline bomb. Conversations with his therapist reveal how much of the pain is still on the surface, raw and abrasive.

Together with fellow residents from the tower blocks of New Lodge, whose lives have also been marked, each in their own way, by the Troubles, McNally stages memories of his childhood. The vigil for his uncle, how he comforted his grandmother at night.The film's fragmentary structure reflects the way trauma shatters reality and shows how the past constantly wriggles into the present. Endlessly, McNally watches old archival footage in the blue fog of his television, still viewing the world through the lens of that tearing conflict. Through the eyes, he says, of his nine-year-old self.