Sunday Sep 04, 2022
Murder at the Cottage / Film School Radio interview with Director Jim Sheridan
MURDER AT THE COTTAGE shines a bright light on the events and investigation into the brutal killing of two days before Christmas in 1996 of French TV producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier at her holiday cottage in Schull, West Cork. In 2019, the key suspect, English journalist Ian Bailey – the first reporter on the scene – was found guilty in absentia by the French courts yet was never found guilty in Ireland, owing to a lack of reliable evidence. In the true crime docuseries, MURDER AT THE COTTAGE: THE SEARCH FOR JUSTICE FOR SOPHIE, Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Jim Sheridan takes viewers on a journey of the unsolved case that has haunted West Cork for almost 25 years. Piecing together original evidence, never-before-seen footage and interviews with those closest to the case, Sheridan tries to make sense of what happened that night. Having successfully fought repeated extradition requests from the French authorities, Bailey still resides in West Cork and maintains his innocence to this day. Six-time Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, The Boxer) joins us for a conversation on the haunting specter Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s savage murder had in motivating him to make this docuseries, the complicated “suspect” that Ian Bailey became over the last two and a half years, the international political and judicial hand grenade that the case presented for France and Ireland, and the role that the local Irish police had in bolloxing the entire investigation into the victim’s unsolved death. Watch Murder at the Cottage at: topic.com