Recencies van critici

There is sorrow in this recognition, but—to the film’s immense credit—nothing like nostalgia. Instead, the film poses cinema itself as the instrument that, at once, links the dispersed members of a political movement, and serves as the thin thread that connects father to son, across time, and beyond death.

Eschewing easy conclusions in favor of infinite critique, the politics of the film are found, even more so than in Foreman’s conflicted admiration for McCaig and the nationalist movement, in its very approach to image-making and historical memory—a devastating performance of the inseparability of the personal, the political, and the aesthetic.

Exhuming largely unseen footage from MacCaig’s decades-large archive, Foreman pierces together the image a father he seldom knew, and conjures up a deeply personal feature that weaves together a fragile parent-child relationship with a portrait of a country the two filmed and experienced—in profoundly different ways.

A moving and thoughtful first-person essay film by Irish-born filmmaker Donal Foreman. . . . Foreman looks back upon MacCaig’s life and career in an attempt to both understand his estranged father’s apparent disinterest in raising a family and his paradoxical dedication to cinema as a tool for stoking unity and sociopolitical change.

More than a mere homage, the film provides a meticulous and challenging comparison of two different ways of being a man, a citizen, and a filmmaker.