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: 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. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival 1994, and after My Left Foot it confirmed Sheridan as the most internationally significant Irish director of his generation.

It is based on the real 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 convicted separately, as one of the Maguire Seven, and imprisoned too. The film covers the years in prison and the long campaign to clear their names, and the failures of the British state that the case laid bare.

This was Sheridan's second film with Daniel Day-Lewis, after My Left Foot and before The Boxer, and with Postlethwaite and Emma Thompson (as the lawyer Gareth Peirce) in support it became one of the most distinguished British-Irish productions of the 1990s. It also fed into the wider British argument about miscarriages of justice in the years of the IRA conflict. Day-Lewis's central performance is one of the most sustained pieces of acting in his career.