This year the BFI is hosting a season celebrating The Cinematic Life of Boxing, showcasing a diverse range of films that represent the sport on the big screen. From genre-defining giants like Stallone’s Rocky, to historical documentaries exploring its harsh realities, Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonk has curated a series of screenings and Q&As that see cinematic life through a boxing lens, using it as a way to ultimately explore ‘the human spirit’ itself.
As part of the season, on Tuesday 14th April BFI Southbank screened Jim Sheridan’s 1997 film, The Boxer, loosely inspired by the life of prolific boxer Barry McGuigan. The film follows Danny (played by Daniel-Day Lewis), a former provisional IRA volunteer who returns to his hometown after spending 14 years in prison. His inability to escape his past and his reconnection with his childhood sweetheart forces him to confront his old allegiances, exploring the competing agendas and intense violence of the Irish Troubles.
McGuigan’s boxing career, as explored in the Q&A session with him after the film, was marked by the conflicts sparked by his success. A man heralded in the international boxing hall of fame, he held the WBA and lineal featherweight titles from 1985-86, and has represented Ireland, Northern Ireland and competed for British titles in his fights.
Though he advocated for an end to sectarian violence during the Troubles, McGuigan’s neutrality was ill received, with IRA members and loyalists wanting him to pick a side.The Boxer explores these tensions, released in the final year of the Troubles, and showcases how the sport became a place to reconcile political differences. Throughout his career, McGuigan chose not to wear sectarian colours, and continually asserted that boxing had nothing to do with religion, sect or division. His experience sparring in his local boxing gyms with Catholics and Protestants alike meant that to him, the sport was non-sectarian. Amidst a backdrop of riots and street violence, the gyms became a place to access complex emotions with structure and discipline.
A striking moment in the film that embodied this sentiment saw Danny competing against a Nigerian man in a boxing match in London. The scene explored the intense physicality, strategy and high emotional stakes of boxing matches, made even more tense by the political weight of what Danny represented. As Danny was about to win the fight, he threw in the towel, recognising that any more contact could have ended his opponent’s life. McGuigan described how Sheridan and co-writer Terry George had changed the events, as the boxer’s real life opponent had lost his life in that fight. This choice powerfully showcases filmmaking’s capacity to reimagine history, and became an important symbolic gesture for peace.
McGuigan’s experience as boxing consultant for the film, as he trained Daniel Day-Lewis for a year in Ireland, reaffirmed to him that every fight has an arc, a story that makes it ‘majestic’. In the face of violence, he had tried to use the sport to create happiness, and in doing so captured the paradox of how a brutal sport played a crucial role in breaking cycles of political violence. The depiction of the events on screen have only amplified the incredible story.