BBC Documentaries

The White Handkerchief (2022x25)

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30 January 2022 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. As the people of Derry city came together to commemorate the event, a bold new piece of musical theatre was staged in the Guildhall - the intended but never-reached destination for the fateful 1972 civil rights march. Commissioned by the city’s Playhouse Theatre, The White Handkerchief seeks to create a dramatic elegy to the 13 killed alongside those others injured, and to catalyse a creative legacy from those devastating events. The result is a bold experiment which renders the events of Bloody Sunday on a vivid new audio-visual canvas and seeks to inspire a new generation of local talent in musical theatre, offering a bright and unexpected legacy of that day 50 years ago. Filmed over nine months, this intimate portrait takes viewers into the heart of the production and a city striving to come to terms with the defining event of its recent history.