Light Years (2015)

ridiculous rating

Admirable film.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

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.

There is no doubt that imagination protects from pain. And kids master in that. What they see beyond the sky is nothing less than "God's Hat", so there's no surprise when they believe that a Mum's or a Dad's life is forever. Like the one of a star which remains visible even if dead, being "light years" distant from us. A family can be a constellation of stars: they keep illuminating each other's life although they are no more. What if one of those glittering stars is a dying mother whose brain is collapsing but not her love for her 3 kids? The younger, Rose, is only 8 but she "knows" inside of herself that her mum is still there for her and will protect her as a "God's Hat". Talented British helmer Esther May Campbell wrote and directed her first long feature film like a wonder-dream, full of amazing audio/visual ideas that stir the audience and satisfy the critics. Nothing is there by chance, like a lyrical symphony sounding powerful and tender at the same time. Acclaimed at Venice Critic's Week 2015. Can't wait to watch her second feature film!