In His Father’s Name

In my father’s Name is a movie which I started watching at about 12:00 am, I wanted to go to bed in half an hour and continue that movie the following night, but I ended up sleeping at 3:00 am as I sat and watched the whole of the movie.

It’s a story of a happy go lucky guy who of all things in the world wants to gets away from the control of his timid and conservative father and enjoy life on the high wire. He get away from Ireland to England to be as far as possible from his father. Being from Ireland he and a few of his friends and their families are tortured and framed in an IRA bombing case by the British police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

He gets 30 years prison sentence. His father is also convicted to 15 years sentence. He goes to his prison cell and then realizes to his utter horror that his father too has been assigned to the same cell, and his father's confession that he gald to be a guiding force in his son's prison life did not help. Of all places this was where he wanted to be away from his father, but he had to be under his watchful eye again.

Here his new life started, at the prime of his years, amid ruins. He loves his father but hates his ways of dealing with life. He had always seen his father as a timid person whose kind would become extinct in the evolutionary cycle.

But as the despondency of the prison becomes overwhelming does he realize that his timid father has a strength which he lacked, the strength of hope. His father was working on plan to expose the violation of Prevention of Terrorism Act and found hope and purpose to cling on to whereas he was finding himself sulking about life doing drugs and partnering with the strong men of prison world to incite his timid father's watchful eye.

Slowly he realized that the strong men he admired were in fact very inhuman and that their strength was a weakness of theirs to fight their feeling of insecurity. At one point he makes a ‘principled’ stand against the strong men when they try to burn the prison warden. It is only here he realizes that his father’s ubiquitous timidity was in fact great strength of principle.

It is here the father son relationship is restored. Just then his father beings to die, all his father wants is to meet his family, but that is not granted. He then asks his father how he copes separation with his wife. His father replies ‘Every night that I got to bed, I take your mom’s hand in mine and walk parks and the streets of Dublin, I have been doing it every night all these years’.

After his father’s death he remains in the prison for another 10 years, a completely changed man. Reading books, writing articles, exercising to keep himself fit. He continues this until the day evidence is uncovered the police officials had willfully framed him and his father and that he had spent 15 years in prison for no mistake of his. He is released with an apology.

He came into the prison a despondent man who thought his life, with the 40 sentence was over. When his father came and told him that he had given himself in to see to it that his son would be well, he was mad that his father would continue to keep a watchful eye over him.

But only in this state of complete loss, does the ground become fertile for a complete metamorphosis. Through his father’s, hope and principled resilience, his life gets a new meaning. He learnt the way to live from the very person, his father, whoes way of life he loathed. After his father's death, he lives on continuing where his father left, unwilling to give in to despondence, to fight the battle of life in His Father’s Name.