For Jim Sheridan, the defense of the falsely accused isn’t just a theme — it’s a calling embedded deep in his DNA. “My mother blamed herself for killing her mother, who died in childbirth,” says the Irish director and playwright. “So it was inherent in me. In the womb, from the fucking start, this feeling for the wrongly accused.”
That unwavering obsession, one that has powered the six-time Oscar nominee’s career—from In the Name of the Father (1993), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as wrongly convicted IRA suspect Gerry Conlon, to his latest project Re-creation, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday—traces back to what Sheridan calls his “pre-natal sense of guilt.”
“Whenever that happens,” he says, “when I see somebody wrongly accused, it just flips a switch, and I go nuts, you know? I can’t deal with it.”
With Re-creation, Sheridan and co-director David Merriman explore one of Ireland’s most haunting unsolved crimes: The 1996 murder of French film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier, who was found brutally beaten outside her holiday home in Toormore, West Cork. The film constructs a fictionalized courtroom trial that never happened for a case that remains unresolved to this day.
Sheridan already explored the case in a 5-part TV documentary, A Murder at the Cottage (2021), but came away with the sense he didn’t do justice to the story. With Re-creation, he blends fiction, docudrama, and emotion in a way that defies genre conventions.
“I suppose, because I wanted to put into fiction what I couldn’t put into documentary reality,” he explains. “I wanted to show the blur between the lines between documentary, reality and fiction.”
The hybrid formallowed Sheridan to address what he saw as failures in both the media and legal responses to du Plantier’s murder—particularly the treatment of Ian Bailey, an English journalist and the primary suspect, who was arrested but never charged in Ireland, convicted in absentia in France, and who died still professing his innocence in 2024.
Bailey’s story came to global attention with the 2021 Netflix series Sophie: A Murder in West Cork, which Sheridan believes deeply misrepresented the truth. The My Left Foot and In America director has harsh words for the whole genre of true crime, which he sees as often driven by sensationalism and vendetta. “The entire bloody True Crime genre is now based around In Cold Blood, Truman Capote. It’s based around this relentless revenge agenda, and it’s very uncomfortable to me,” he says. “The actual greatest writer on true crime… is Thomas De Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater). He was in the genre of the wrongly accused. That’s a more empathetic position than this kind of avenging God bullshit.”
Shot on a shoestring budget over three weeks — “we wrote it in three weeks and filmed it three weeks later,” Sheridan says — the bulk of Re-creation unfolds in a single jury room, in homage to 12 Angry Men. The directors borrowed the claustrophobic intensity of Sidney Lumet’s 1957 classic and fused it with the ambiguity of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall to reflect skepticism toward both the judicial process and the media machine surrounding it.
In an exclusive clip from the film (below), the jury tries to retrace Sophie’s steps, and imagine her state of mind, on the night she was murdered.
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Sheridan himself plays the jury foreman. Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) appears as the quietly forceful juror number 8, who becomes a symbolic voice for Sophie in the film. The ensemble also includes The Commitments star Colm Meaney in a silent role as Ian Bailey, Game of Thrones actor Aidan Gillen as a defense lawyer, and Irish actor and filmmaker John Connors (The Black Guelph) as one of the jurors.
Though exteriors were filmed on location in West Cork, most interiors were shot on soundstages in Dublin and in Luxembourg. The script, while foundational, was heavily improvised. “We only had an outline,” says Sheridan. “It was an attempt to cross the line between fiction and fact and to show that those lines have been irretrievably blurred.”
Thanks to Sheridan’s dogged efforts, the murder investigation into the du Plantier case is currently the subject of a cold case review by the Garda Serious Crime Team, the Irish investigative police.
Sheridan and Merriman hope their film rekindles public interest and spurs legal action. “We’re hopeful that, at least in Ireland, that this film could start a conversation which will drive people to, you know, do the right thing,” Merriman says. “To search for justice and find out who actually killed Sophie Toscan du Plantier, rather than just saying, ‘Oh, Ian Bailey did it,’ and that’s good for us, because he’s English, so he’s a villain.”