For the last 30 years, the Maze prison has been at the heart of Northern Ireland's bloody conflict. Since it opened in 1972, just 12 miles west of Belfast in an abandoned World War II United States Air Force base, men of violence from both sides of the sectarian divide served time here. There were riots, murders and dramatic escapes. While a prisoner in the Maze, IRA gunman Bobby Sands was elected to the British parliament just days before he died in a hunger strike. It was an opening gambit of IRA participation in a political process. This film tells the story of the Irish conflict in its most condensed form-through the place where the violence was at its worst, but where the first exploration of peaceful steps took place as well.