SYNOPSIS
West of Memphis. In 1994, in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas, three teenagers were accused of enacting satanic rituals and subsequently convicted of murdering three eight-year-old boys. Their confessions were inconsistent, the legitimacy of prosecution witnesses was spurious, but for 18 years the judge who presided over the initial court case denied successive retrial bids. Amy Berg, director of Academy Award-nominated Deliver Us From Evil, was making this riveting documentary when the court finally succumbed to increasing public and legal pressure and ‘freed’ The West Memphis 3. One of the falsely accused, Damien Echols, is a producer of this film, along with campaigner Lorri Davis (his wife), and filmmakers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. This unexpected collaboration accounts not only for the unswerving focus of the film, but also the unprecedented access which enables Berg to reveal new material about the well documented case and to convincingly posit the most likely culprit.
