In the Name of the Father

Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father opened in 1993 and was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), Best Supporting Actor (Pete Postlethwaite), Best Supporting Actress (Emma Thompson), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival 1994 and consolidated Sheridan, after his earlier My Left Foot, as the most internationally significant Irish director of his generation.

The film is based on the actual case of the Guildford Four — Gerry Conlon (Day-Lewis), Paul Hill (John Lynch), Paddy Armstrong, and Carole Richardson — who were wrongfully convicted in 1975 of an IRA pub bombing they had not committed. Conlon's father Giuseppe Conlon (Pete Postlethwaite, in a career-defining performance) was also convicted and imprisoned alongside them. The film follows the years of imprisonment, the eventual quashing of the convictions in 1989, and the broader continuing British-state procedural failures the case exposed.

Sheridan's collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis (their second after My Left Foot, before the eventual The Boxer) and the supporting performances of Postlethwaite and Emma Thompson as the lawyer Gareth Peirce produced one of the most distinguished British-Irish productions of the 1990s. The film became politically consequential in the broader continuing UK conversation about miscarriages of justice, particularly during the IRA-conflict era. Day-Lewis's central performance is one of the most sustained acting commitments of his career.