Historian Eunan O'Halpin leads this look at the darker side of the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War that followed, the killings of suspected informers whose bodies were hidden rather than returned to their families. Where popular memory frames the period as a clean fight for independence, O'Halpin traces the cases of men, some guilty, many innocent, shot as spies by republican units and buried in secret. The film gets exclusive access to a real exhumation at one of these burial sites, following the forensic team as they work to identify remains decades later and give families a grave to visit. Archival photographs, contemporary documents, and testimony from historians and descendants build the case for how many such disappearances there were and why the state and communities stayed silent about them for so long. The result is a corrective to the heroic narrative, told through the physical evidence still coming out of the ground.