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DEATH OF A SON – The Killing Of Michael Dwyer

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In 2009 a young man from Tipperary, Michael Dwyer, was shot dead by a secret police unit in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

Accused after his death of being tied in with terrorist group activity against Bolivia and its President, Evo Morales, Michael Dwyer never had the opportunity to answer questions or refute any of the reports subsequently written about him. His mother, Caroline, a remarkable woman, has spent much of the last six years trying to find out what happened to her son. In this very personal film she travels to Bolivia, Brazil, Washington and Brussels as she searches for answers and looks for an international inquiry into why her son died such a terrible death so far from home.

This film will be a journey into the heart of South America taken by Caroline Dwyer and her family to find out why and how her son, Michael, was shot dead by secret police in Bolivia in 2009, apparently foiled in an attempt to assassinate President Evo Morales. Since the night when Michael Dwyer, Eduardo Rozsa Flores and Arpad Magyarosi were killed and two more men were taken into custody, we felt that the story put into the international press did not hang together, having all the elements of a deadly thriller but with too many loose ends, far-fetched characters and extraordinary explanations for what happened and Michael Dwyer’s role in it all.

This documentary explores what led a seemingly ordinary young man like Michael Dwyer to Bolivia and how he got caught up in something so unimaginable that it led to his violent death there at the hands of the secret police. The film accompanies his mother, Caroline, on a voyage of discovery as she seeks to find out what her son was up to and how much she really knew him in his final years. To her it is unthinkable that he could have been guilty of all the things he was accused of in the wake of his death; she has to go and find out now for herself what happened.

This documentary will chronicle her journey. It will be a deeply personal film, a mother’s odyssey into uncharted territory. Caroline will take steps back into the life Michael was leading before he left for Bolivia and will trace his life once he got there, what he did for five months and where it led him, to find out why and how her son died and if any of it makes sense.

The film will reveal a complex international tale encompassing continents and cultures that has at its heart a personal drama and family tragedy. It will be part detective story (as she follows all the threads of the story back to their beginnings in order to unpick them) and part meditation on motherhood and the ties that bind family together. In the years since his death she has tried to find out more of what went on in South America, never believing the official version of what happened. With this film, she will be going so much farther than that and making herself vulnerable in the process. What will make this film so compelling is that she does not know exactly what she will find out as she goes to Hungary, Bolivia and the United States in search of answers to this bewildering mystery. Caroline knows what she would like to discover but also that things may not turn out that way. She still wants to embark on this.