Jim Sheridan
10 October 1974, Gerry Conlon (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his father Joseph (Pete Postlethwaite) are accused, along with other Irishmen, of attacks claimed by IRA. In this situation, a civil war without quarter provokes the British Army's reaction that will declare them guilty of a terrorist attack in a pub, and then finally arrest them. Fifteen years of imprisonment seen as a period of enforced personal growth that will unite prisoners in a struggle for truth and liberation and will help father and son, to draw closer.
“In the Name of the Father” appears as a two-faced political film. On the one hand, the inalienable denunciation of an obscene abuse of the English judicial power, on the other the structuring of this denunciation that derives from the Irish Catholic perspective. The film through the geographical pretext and through the aspiration of a 'virginity to be reconquered' is configured as a true journey of the protagonist, where the horizontal geographical displacement is replaced by the vertical one of an evolutionary process of father-son contrast. Only by overcoming the obstacles that prevent him from seeing the light of truth, Gerry finds himself 'in the name of the father'. A very beautiful movie, that maybe lacks a little bit of drama that would have made it a masterpiece. On the other hand this absence of excessive heaviness makes the film as fast as a rock song, which with a plot like that was a moment to do something like "Polish 7-hour Holocaust movie with Arabic subtitles".
In The Name Of The Father
director JIM SHERIDAN
year 1993
director of photography PETER BIZIOU
cast DANIEL DAY-LEWIS, PETE POSTLETHWAITE, EMMA THOMPSON, JOHN LYNCH
words SILVIA GAIA MARCELLI
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