IFC Films has released The Journey trailer. The film is centered around an imagined conversation between Democratic Unionist Party’s Ian Paisley (Timothy Spall) and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness (Colm Meaney). They represent the warring heads that have brought violence and chaos to Northern Ireland for years, and the movie tries to sit them down and envision how they ever came together and agreed to start moving towards peace.

I saw the film at TIFF last year and really enjoyed it. Spall and Meaney are both excellent, and while this trailer plays up the role of Tony Blair (Toby Stephens), who provides the dry comic relief, more than he appears in the actual film, it’s a good look at a movie that should definitely be on your radar. Director Nick Hamm really takes his time setting up the enmity between these two men and the difficulty of moving towards any kind of reconciliation when the past and other external factors weigh so heavily on the minds of independent actors. Click here for my full review.

Check out The Journey trailer below along with Steve Weintraub’s interview with Hamm and Meaney. The film opens on June 16th.

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Here’s the official synopsis for The Journey:

The Journey is the gripping account of how two men from opposite sides of the political spectrum came together to change the course of history. In 2006, amidst the ongoing, decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland, representatives from the two warring factions meet for negotiations. In one corner is Ian Paisley (Timothy Spall), the deeply conservative British loyalist; in the other is Martin McGuinness (Colm Meaney), a former Irish Republican Army leader who has devoted his life to the cause of Irish reunification. Opposites in every way, the two men at first seem to have little chance of ever finding common ground. But over the course of an impromptu, detour-filled car ride through the Scottish countryside, each begins to see the other less as an enemy, and more as an individual—a breakthrough that promises to at last bring peace to the troubled region. Driven by two virtuoso central performances, The Journey is a more-relevant-than-ever reminder of how simple humanity can overcome political division. John Hurt costars.