Synopsis
An innocent man is forced to make a false confession to a horrifying crime. A son strives to make peace with his father and searches for the courage to endure. A prisoner fights against impossible odds to win freedom and clear his father's name. In the Name of the Father powerfully encompasses the struggle of one man, Gerry Conlon, through his harrowing ordeal and eventual triumph over injustice.Academy Award winners Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot, The Last of the Mohicans) and Emma Thompson (Howard's End, The Remains of the Day) join director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, The Field) in this gripping drama, which powerfully re-creates and Illuminates one of the most riveting events in recent British history. Sheridan serves as producer, with Arthur Lappin as co-producer and Gabriel Byrne, who originally acquired the rights to Gerry Cordon's life story for Sheridan, as executive producer.
The screenplay by Sheridan and co-executive producer Terry George, a Belfast-born journalist and playwright, was based on Gerry Cordon's Proved Innocent, the memoirs of a Belfast youth who, along with friends and family members, was wrongly convicted by the British government in 1975 for the terrorist bombing of two pubs in Guildford, a small town outside London. Among those imprisoned was Conlon's father Giuseppe, caught purely by chance in a wide net cast by the police in the aftermath of the murders.
Imprisoned for 15 years, the "Guildford Four," as the principal defendants were called, finally won their freedom in a ruling that has sparked widespread controversy and even today continues to shake the British legal system to its foundations.
