Thorough investigative documentary filmmaking done with deft skill and strong pulsating heart, Unquiet Graves delivers revelations into the Glennane gang murders that will shock many and hopefully provide resolution for some of those slain during the tumultuous Troubles.

Unquiet Graves is filled with so much information that at times it can be too much to process. Yet such was the overflow of murder, terror, and conspiracy that was found during “The Troubles”. For those who don’t know, “The Troubles” was a conflict within Northern Ireland that began in the late 1960s and ended with the Good Friday agreement of 1998. More than 3,500 people were killed in this “low-level war” between loyalist Protestants and republican Catholics. The majority of those were civilians.

Unquiet Graves concentrates on 120 of those deaths by the hands of the “Glennane gang”, a group of Ulster loyalists who orchestrated a campaign of terror against Catholic civilians during the 1970s. What made this most shocking was that a high number of British police and soldiers were a part of this group. Unquiet Graves takes these claims further. With a depth of information and testimony both expert and intimate a strong case for collusion is made, with the higher echelons of British military intelligence and the British government itself playing a part in these murders.

Director Sean A Murray presents these revelations within a sombre, hard, fact-based filmmaking deserving of its subject matter. While the word “collusion” has been used numerous times to almost comical effect over the last few years, its use in Unquiet Graves hits hard and precise in its exclamation that state-sanctioned murder has been committed.

A healthy does of archival footage, dramatics recreations, and interviews with a wide array of activists, witnesses, and other assorted figureheads feature throughout. Two interviews in particular represent the tragedy and horror of these crimes. One is with John Weir, a former policeman and member of the Glennane gang, whose testimony brought further credence to the claims of collusion. A ghoulish looking figure with sunken eyes, Weir’s confession that the Glennane gang had planned (yet thankfully not gone through with) to attack a primary school with all intentions to kill every student and teacher is shocking in its matter-of-face statement of violence.

A more powerful testimony is found during an interview with Margaret Campbell, who in 1973 saw her husband gunned down by loyalist paramilitaries at their front door just as they were about to sit for dinner with their children. With her face filling the frame of the camera, tears in her eyes, and tremble in her voice, Margaret describes the horror and the sadness that befell her and her family that night.

It is in this moment, and many others throughout Unquiet Graves, we are reminded of the real cost, so primal and so inhumane and so unjust, that has befallen a generation of Northern Irish men and women. We are also reminded that while the bodies of those departed are indeed buried, their spirits and their memory are kept alive by those who fight for justice. Hopefully the revelations that Unquiet Graves delivers will lead to the resolution so many deserve.