Director: Gerry Gregg
85 mins, Ireland-Germany-Spain-Australia-UK-USA, 2023, Digital
![](https://ifi.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/face-down_med.jpg)
On December 27th 1973, German businessman, factory manager, and honorary consul Thomas Niedermayer was kidnapped from his home in Belfast. He was never seen alive again by friends or family. He became one of the ‘disappeared’, and it seemed that no-one knew what had happened to him. A frenzied web of media speculation led to spurious reports of Niedermayer’s alcoholism, philandering, and gun running, while IRA military propaganda triggered investigations into loyalist responsibility for the murder. Niedermayer’s wife Ingeborg and his young daughters spent the next seven years not knowing if Thomas was alive or dead until, in 1980, an IRA informant led to the recovery of his body.
Director Gerry Gregg (Condemned to Remember) accompanies Niedermayer’s adult granddaughters as they embark on a painful journey of discovery – framed by writer David Blake Knox’s uncompromising investigation of deceit, collusion, and unhealed wounds which challenge the possibility of forgiveness.
Notes by Sunniva O’Flynn