Bobby Sands: 66 Days Bobby Sands: 66 Days Bobby Sands: 66 Days is a 2016 documentary film about Bobby Sands and the 1981 Irish hunger strike from Northern Ireland. The film mixes reenactment, animation, interviews and archive footage to relate the story of Bobby Sands and the 1981 Irish hunger strike, as well as covering the events leading up to the hunger strike and its complex legacy. Martin McCann reads several excerpts from Sands' own diary. "Bobby Sands: 66 Days" premiered at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto on 3 May 2016. It went on general release in Ireland on 5 August
1981 Irish hunger strike intervals, which they believed would arouse maximum public support and exert maximum pressure on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The republican movement initially struggled to generate public support for the second hunger strike. The Sunday before Sands began his strike, 3,500 people marched through west Belfast. During the first hunger strike four months earlier the marchers had numbered 10,000. Five days into the strike, Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone Frank Maguire died, resulting in a by-election. There was debate among nationalists and republicans regarding who should contest the election: Austin Currie of the Social Democratic and Labour Party