The austere but gripping "Bullet in the Head," which has already been released in Spain and comes out in France in March, is part of a new wave of fact-based European films grappling with terrorism in striking and unusually visual ways. Other examples include "Hunger," a brutally savage yet painterly depiction of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands' 1981 hunger strike directed by English contemporary artist and former Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen; Germany's Golden Globe-nominated "The Baader Meinhof Complex," about a radical group of left-wing European terrorists who began operating at the end of the 1960s and gave birth to the Red Army Faction; and the French-made "Public Enemy No. 1, parts 1 & 2," a diptych of films about the notorious gangster and pseudo-terrorist Jacques Mesrine, who roiled France during the 1970s.
All these films have attracted controversy for choosing to depict terrorism from the terrorists' point of view -- an approach far removed from the usual Hollywood focus on officers enforcing the law.
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