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Some Mother's Son

Some Mother's Son is a 1996 drama film directed by Terry George, his first feature, about two fictional mothers whose sons join the 1981 Irish republican hunger strike in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. It was written by George with Jim Sheridan, the pair who had received an Oscar nomination for their screenplay of In the Name of the Father (1993), and it stars Helen Mirren, Fionnula Flanagan, Aidan Gillen, David O'Hara, and John Lynch as Bobby Sands.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Terry George (directorial debut); screenplay by Terry George and Jim Sheridan¹^•³
Setting	The 1981 hunger strike at the Maze (Long Kesh) prison, led by Bobby Sands, in which ten prisoners died⁴
Lead cast	Helen Mirren as Kathleen Quigley; Fionnula Flanagan as Annie Higgins; Aidan Gillen as Gerard Quigley; David O'Hara as Frank Higgins; John Lynch as Bobby Sands⁵
Festival premiere	Un Certain Regard, 49th Cannes Film Festival, 1996, as a first film¹
Awards	Granada Award for Best Gala Film at the 50th Edinburgh Film Festival (audience vote); European Film Award for Young European Film of the Year 1996; Audience and Youth Jury awards at San Sebastián⁶^•⁷
Release	Los Angeles opening 25 December 1996; New York the week of 26 December 1996; United States gross about $608,000⁵^•⁸
Reception	75% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (16 reviews); 7.2/10 on IMDb⁸

Spoilers

Plot and central dilemma

The film is set in Northern Ireland in 1981, when IRA prisoners in the Maze demanded prisoner-of-war status rather than treatment as criminals, and Bobby Sands led them in a hunger strike to press the claim.⁹ Kathleen Quigley (Mirren) is a widowed, apolitical Catholic schoolteacher who does not know that her son Gerard (Gillen) is in the IRA, until he and the fugitive IRA activist Frank Higgins (O'Hara) are captured after an assault on British troops.¹⁰ Frank's mother Annie (Flanagan), from a republican family, supports her son's choice; Kathleen cannot see how any mother could make that decision, telling Annie that the dead British soldiers were also "some mother's son."⁴

The two women form an uneasy alliance as their sons join Sands and the other strikers. When the fasting men lose the ability to speak for themselves, each mother faces the same decision: honor her son's stated wish to die for the cause, or oppose it and ask the authorities to have him fed by force.⁹ Roger Ebert, the longtime film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, described the film's central question as whether any political belief is worth sacrificing the life of your son, and praised Mirren's performance as embodying that question.⁴

Historical background and the director

The film is a fictionalized account of the 1981 IRA hunger strike at Belfast's Maze Prison, in which ten prisoners died over the issue of wearing criminals' prison uniforms; Sands, one of the dead, had been elected to Parliament while in prison, and his funeral procession drew 100,000 mourners.⁴ The film's political details are historical fact, while Kathleen, Annie, their sons, and most of the priests, British officials, and IRA leaders are fictional.¹¹ With the exception of Sands, characters were given fictional names and are intended as composites of actual people, so the Sinn Féin leader Danny Boyle (Ciarán Hinds) and the striker Gerard Quigley cannot simply be equated with real counterparts such as Gerry Adams or Paddy Quinn.¹²

Terry George's own history shaped the film. George, a writer and director born in Belfast, was arrested in 1975 while driving an armed passenger across the city, spent three years of a six-year term in the Maze's political status section before his 1978 release, and during that time got to know many mothers of prisoners along with some of the hunger strikers.¹³ After working with Jim Sheridan on In the Name of the Father (1993) as co-screenwriter and second unit director, he rewrote the script with Sheridan.¹³ George and his team also studied archival television news footage of the strikes, kept on videotape by a friend of George's, and the media representation of the conflict influenced the writing, shooting, and editing of the film.¹³ Producer Arthur Lappin said the film was "certainly not proselytising for the IRA but the film does try to redress a media imbalance regarding the hunger strikes."¹³

Reception and controversy

The film premiered at the 49th Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, where the London Evening Standard critic Alexander Walker called it "a mischievous fiction"; the Irish Film Board and the filmmakers rejected the assertion, and George said the disputed scenes were based on actual events.² In August 1996 it unexpectedly won the Granada Award for Best Gala Film at the 50th Drambuie Edinburgh Film Festival, an audience-voted prize, and the Irish Times reported that distributors approached the film cautiously, with no British release date set at that time.⁶

Reactions diverged sharply. The Washington Post review called it a retelling of Sands's hunger strike "with passionate spirit, and considerable dramatic license," noting that to unionist viewers it amounted to glorification while to supporters of the nationalist cause it told it as it was.¹⁰ Walker denounced it as adopting a Sinn Féin-IRA agenda, while the Observer critic Philip French argued that Sinn Féin and the IRA were shown as "manipulative, deceitful, posturing and cruel."¹² The film opened in a politically tense climate after the 1996 breakdown of the IRA ceasefire, which affected its reception along with other Troubles films such as Michael Collins.¹² Time Out's retrospective review called it "IRA propaganda it is not," describing it instead as a plea for humanity over ideological point-scoring.¹⁴

Place among hunger strike films

Some Mother's Son was the first of three major feature films about the 1981 Maze hunger strike, followed by H3 (Les Blair, 2001) and Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008); for both George and McQueen it was a first feature.¹⁵^•¹³ Unlike H3 and Hunger, which offer little historical and political context, Some Mother's Son presents events outside the prison and the political campaign around the strike.¹⁶ A 2023 academic analysis by Raita Merivirta of the University of Turku argues that both Some Mother's Son and Hunger use Margaret Thatcher's voice and image to provide a mediatised countermemory of the strike, countering British media coverage by humanizing the protesting prisoners.¹⁷ The film opens with Thatcher, newly elected, quoting St. Francis of Assisi, and follows her government's policy of isolating, criminalizing, and demoralizing IRA members, the last of which produced the strike.¹¹

Production

The film was produced by Jim Sheridan, Arthur Lappin, and Edward Burke for Hell's Kitchen Films and Castle Rock Entertainment, with Columbia Pictures as distributor; Geoffrey Simpson was the cinematographer, Craig McKay the editor, Bill Whelan (the Riverdance composer) wrote the music, and David Wilson was production designer.⁵^•¹⁸^•¹⁷ It was filmed in Ireland, with locations including County Dublin, and runs about 112 minutes; it is rated R in the United States and 15 in the United Kingdom.¹⁸^•¹^•¹⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1990s › Drama films late 1990s › Released 1995 to 1998

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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