A defining moment in Northern Ireland's modern Troubles came on January 30, 1972 when British soldiers opened fire on a civil rights march in Derry, killing 13 and injuring 14 more. Bloody Sunday helped rekindle a decades-long conflict and escalate it into a civil war, driving countless young men to join the IRA.

"Bloody Sunday" tells the story of that day in an unusual 100-minute chronological docudrama that feels like a TV news documentary, with quick cuts, gritty footage and a reliance on hand-held cameras that may cause queasiness in some viewers (it gave this reviewer a bit of a headache).

The film opens as the January 30, 1972 did, with people rising from their beds and greeting the day. Soon, however, civil rights activists are preparing for their march, which they are aiming to keep peaceful. At the same time, British soldiers and police authories appear to be plotting ways to ensure that the day won't end without bloodshed.

We meet Ivan Cooper, an idealistic Protestant civil rights leader firmly entrenched in the Catholic camp and committed to the peaceful change championed by Martin Luther King. There's 17-year-old Catholic rebel Gerry Donaghy who wants to marry his Protestant girlfriend; there's Brigadier Patrick MacLellan, British Army commander in Derry, who feels pressure to prevent the march from even taking place at all. And there's the young solider whose conscience is challenged by what he witnesses that day.

The costumes, the production design ... everything feels extremely realistic and Derry is painted in depressing blues, greys and blacks, making the flowing red blood even more stark.

Equally vivid is the humanity captured by a wonderful cast, that includes James Nesbitt who must deliver a wide range of emotion, from outrage to horror to sorrow in rendering Cooper. Declan Duddy, whose 17-year-old ungle Jackie Duddy died on Bloody Sunday in 1972, makes an inspired debut as Gerry Donaghy.

Director Paul Greengrass clearly has something to say here and he says it eloquently and, with the help of Director of Photography Ivan Strasburg, in a hard-hitting fashion. Naysayers will point to Greengrass' pedigree -- he was the first journalist to film the hunger strikes in the Maze Prison -- and say he's unreliable.

Whether or not that's true, "Bloody Sunday" is a powerful, artfully painted picture of a day in modern history that surely ought to live, as the saying goes, in infamy.

"Bloody Sunday" opens Fri., Oct. 25 at Landmark's Downer Theatre.