A wrenching re-creation

Toronto: Air India 182 is one of the marquee entries at the Hot Docs film festival, yet it's a movie so gripping and suspenseful in its retelling of a large-scale tragedy that it frequently seems like a tautly written drama instead of grim reality.
The film, from Toronto-based Sturla Gunnarsson, delves into the events leading up to the deadliest airborne terrorist attack until 9/11, and the biggest mass murder in Canadian history -- the bombing of Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland that left 329 people dead, many of them children.
The film -- which premieres today at the festival -- intersperses newsreel footage and inconspicuous re- enactments of the men who plotted the bombing with searing segments involving the victims' relatives, sitting against a snow-white backdrop as they recount the last time they saw their family members alive.
These were stories the Icelandic-born Gunnarsson, raised in B.C., had wanted to tell for more than two decades after witnessing Sikh fundamentalists in Vancouver urging vengeance against India because of the government's oppression of Sikhs.
Gunnarsson had to wait patiently to make the film, however, since so much was unknown and unreported as the case against the bombers slowly worked its way through the court system over 20 years. Just one man of several charged was convicted -- Interjit Singh Reyat, who has spent almost 20 years in prison on manslaughter charges.
"(Finally) I could carve out a clear narrative and at the same time restore to the victims some sense of identity, because over the years they became kind of dehumanized, they were just this mass of faceless victims,'' Gunnarsson said.
17/04/08 Lee-Anne Goodman/The Canadian Press/Waterloo Record, Canada

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Categories: Air India - International Apr 2008, Foreign Apr 2008, Safety Apr 2008