Documentarian Al Reinert effectively emphasizes understatement, recounting an outrageous miscarriage of justice without a trace
of manufactured melodrama or visual hyperbole.
- Joe Leydon, Variety
[Michael Morton] fills this all-too-familiar story of injustice and absolution with a uniquely generous, moving spirit.
- Robert Faires, Austin Chronicle
Morton’s spirit of ‘letting go’ doesn’t just carry this extraordinary film. It is the living spirit of the film…
For all its heartache, “An Unreal Dream” is ultimately a story of transcendence.
Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream.
- Justice Learned Hand, 1923
In 1986 Michael Morton's wife Christine is brutally murdered in front of their only child, and Michael is convicted of the crime. Locked away in Texas prisons for a quarter century, he has years to ponder questions of justice and innocence, truth and fate. Though he is virtually invisible to society, a team of dedicated attorneys spends years fighting for the right to test DNA evidence found at the murder scene. Their discoveries ultimately reveal that the price of a wrongful conviction goes well beyond one man's loss of freedom.