Five Minutes of Heaven

In Northern Ireland in 1975 a seventeen-year-old member of a loyalist youth group shoots a man through his front window. The man's eleven-year-old brother is standing in the street and sees everything. Thirty years later a television programme wants to bring the two together: the killer has served his sentence, the brother still lives in that night. The subject is not peace but who the ceremony of reconciliation serves. The programme wants footage of the two men shaking hands; the killer treats it as a kind of atonement, and the brother arrives with an entirely different intention. By showing the preparations behind the camera the film exposes how manufactured the gesture is. The form is split in two. The first half is the two men talking to themselves on the way to the meeting; the second is the expected encounter turning out nothing like expected. The source is real: both men are based on actual people and the screenplay came out of separate interviews with each. But the meeting in the film never happened; that part is invention and the film does not hide it. Liam Neeson plays the killer and James Nesbitt the brother. Oliver Hirschbiegel directs. It won directing and screenwriting prizes at Sundance. Who it is for: viewers interested in Northern Ireland and in two-hander psychological drama. Who it is not for: anyone expecting resolution; the film makes no claim that reconciliation is possible.