Light Years (2015)

Powerful

A Major Disappointment

The acting in this movie is really good.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I was delighted to see Light Years last night.It was a tour de force. I loved the ramming together of lyrically beautiful countryside against the roar of traffic and then long snaking vistas of brutal motor way traffic., embedded in the softness of the trees and the land It encompassed the schizophrenia of the land ( this our England ) the allegory of nature , and then the scars of traffic.I loved the children who were unique , slightly lost in fantasy and anxiety while present in their disorganised every day .The tale was so contemporary , the fractured family and the absent mother . Shocking then too when the mothers first impulse is to buy beer ,making it more sweet , that Rose continues to adhere to civilised behaviour. The child mothers the mother.The enormity of children watching parents disintegrate , how pitiful it was and how courageous they all were.( the image of them watching their parents from the outside of the institution is a haunting one )Not only that but some moments of charm , the deaf boy declaring his love for Rose, performing resuscitation on the white rat, accepting his geographical no go areas, all beautifully and quietly mapped out ,like life. Full of Injury , self doubt, charm , grace and stoicism .What a wonderful tale and a foreign father , good at his job , absorbed ,at ease with bats and butterflies and his own house rotting , curling at the edges around his family .Then there was the terrifying old Father Time figure , half naked ,fit , running , maddened , an old nightmare, a spectre of ageing All these vignettes woven through with flights of birds in configurations that looked like symbols but rendered up no meaning, passages of countryside as pastoral and lovely as a Samuel Palmer and then the appalling ugliness of new builds, wind turbines, warehouses, tracks , noisy roads , all of this an elaborate embroidery , a meta language for a benign form of chaos which the protagonists ride through. bowed a little , but victorious as Victors are, with life still in themIt was an amazing film, thoughtfully made.

Beautiful sound and imagery from the start. But slow to get going.. Once the story of old man time, and light, and family progressed I was swept along with it. Complex themes win lots of hooks for the viewer to relate to. Love, imagination, pain, coping mechanisms, childhood, family, the progress of the world and of life. At times it was tense, funny and a bit weird. But over all it was a visual feast. I loved it. And would love to know where it was filmed. The cast were brilliant, not least 8-year-old Rose and her brother and sister who were the undoubted stars. Beth Orton was Whaley believable, but I wanted to know what was wrong with her.

Following her BAFTA winning September, Esther May Campbell's moving and reflective first feature more than fulfils the promise of her garlanded short film. Joining a select but honourable lineage of British works that display an acute sense of the potencies of place, weather and the edge-lands (active agents in the telling rather than simple background), Light Years is at once a quietly insistent rites-of-passage piece, a subtle meditation on the implications and ripple effects of mental distress and a lyrical celebration of childhood resilience, imagination and common cause in the face of parental absence, whether locational or emotional. With excellent use of painting, still photographs and a genuinely evocative sound-scape, it explores the handing on of experience and the fundamental unknowability at the heart of families and between generations, what might be thought of as the intimate otherness of people (sensitively caught in the ventriloquising witness of a silent night window familial encounter). This empathetic and engaged enquiry is embodied in and anchored by a striking trinity of entirely believable performances from its young cast. Light Years also skilfully deploys acclaimed alt.folk singer-songwriter Beth Orton in a bravely direct portrayal of maternal vulnerability and contradiction and Muhammet Uzuner (from Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) as the quietly collapsing father and husband.Both a heightened realist study of regional lives and (be)longing and a dream of childhood epiphanies among the extraordinary-ordinary days of the suburban / rural borderlands, Light Years shines with an artist's pleasure in associative narrative and place-making, traits more familiar perhaps to audiences of the US independent cinema scene. A true-to-life tale of growing up, a fable of being lost and found, it's a journey into the woods - and out again - that deserves to be widely seen, and striking evidence of a welcome new ensemble of talent, full of conviction in the possibilities of their art.By Gareth Evans Film Curator, Whitechapel Gallery, London Producer, Patience: After Sebald (Gee, 2011) Executive Producer, Unseen: The Lives of Looking (Goodwin, 2015) and By Our Selves (Kotting, 2015).

This British film is set in the border between urban and rural life. A dysfunctional family of children are rattling around an old house in an endless summer holiday, their mum is ill and has changed and is no longer there, their dad seems to be hardly there and is mainly hiding in his work at an industrial horticultural complex. The film is interested in the ways the younger people are copying and understanding the world they are growing into - for example The older girl is exploring her sexuality and a younger brother is fixating with his genetic potential to also have what ever illness has beset his mother. The excellent performances from the mainly young cast and mood the film creates are both dream like and also full of emotion. This film is not about loud large plot points, but is about everyone trying to find something within themselves, for everyone to connect somehow with their past life and move on in some way. The film evokes the emotions of the children trying to shake of the ennui their mum's situation has inflicted on them.The character's journey in various ways through an urban rural edge landscape. One of the younger children eventually finds their mum in the care home. Mother and daughter share a few joyful lucid moments together but this is short lived. I am in danger of listing all the parts of the film and not really reviewing it. This film really should be seen in a good cinema with excellent sound, the film making is very deft and at certain points sublime... and my writing will not do it justice. In Light Years there is a reflectiveness about childhood, and life and what should you do with it and how injustices and fears and anger can curse though you and then somehow go or shift. The film could be seen as a metaphor about growing up, once all the strange teenage hormones disperse into adulthood the characters seem to reach a place where they have to eventually let their mum go.A film not to everyone's taste, but for me this film is trying to say something new, and does it in a way that is very engaging, concise and cinematic.