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ATION The movie no-one wants you to see. WORDS Aa
ron Kavanagh Photo: Rich Gilligan In 1996, the French film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier was murdered while holidaying in the village of Goleen in County Cork. The chief suspect for her murder was the eccentric Mancunian journalist Ian Bailey, who resided near her holiday home. For nearly thirty years, Sophie’s murder has gone unresolved, and with the sudden death of Bailey two years ago, we may never know the truth. But that hasn’t stopped people from speculating. Sophie’s case has been theorised on by journalists and “true crime” podcasters for years, and the story came to international attention with the release of the Netflix docuseries, Sophie: A Murder in West Cork, in 2021. In the same year that A Murder in West Cork was released, another docuseries on the same subject, titled Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie, from the acclaimed Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan, was broadcast on Sky Crime. But Jim was ultimately unhappy with that series. “That one was done with Sky, and I had limitations on what I could say, and I learnt stuff towards the end that I couldn’t get into the documentary,” Jim tells Totally Dublin. “So, we had a lot of new information, and a different way of approaching it, and we wanted to take all the opinions that we had around them and give them an airing, rather than, This is a fact, this is a fact, this is a fact.” While Jim was interviewing people who were suffering the injustices of homelessness at one of Focus Ireland’s Rock Against Homelessness benefit concerts, he met David Merriman, a socially-conscious documentarian, who was shooting footage of the event for Virgin Media. David, a Dublin City native, had been a fan of Jim’s work for decades, having seen In The Name of the Father several times at the Savoy in 1993. Jim had informed him that he was 39