The Civil War, which notoriously ended without resolution but with the Partition of Ireland, haunts many of the films in this series and is the subject of Neil Jordan's dense, controversial big-budget portrait of rebel Michael Collins. "As the story of the man who invented modern guerrilla warfare, it serves also as a study of justifiable violence, and its role in bringing peace and unity in a divided island, issues about which Jordan feels passionately." (Irish Film Archive) "The power of the film is not that it sides with Collins...sanitizing his ruthless street warfare, but that it shows the complexities involved in even describing what took place, let alone passing judgment on the events....It is (the) disturbing reminders in the film that the foundations of the state may itself rest on terror which has drawn the wrath of those historians intent on airbrushing the violence out of Irish history." (Luke Gibbons, "Framing History")