LIGHT YEARS

Eight-year-old Rose (Zamira Fuller) misses her mother Moira (Beth Orton), who lives with Alzheimer’s in a care home. Her father Dee (Muhammet Uzuner) has promised a visit and forgets it; he is withdrawn into himself, and the large house in the country stands in scaffolding. So Rose sets off alone, across ploughed fields, without knowing the direction. Her older siblings Ewan (James Stuckey) and Ramona (Sophia Burton) have to follow her. “Light Years” (2015) by the British director Esther May Campbell is a road movie on foot – about a family that cannot put its loss into words.

Esther May Campbell of the United Kingdom treats, in her feature debut, an illness that erases memory, with a touch of British humour and in images of the English countryside in early summer: hedgerows, woods, a beach. The film is a meditation on absence and on what is left for relatives to carry on with. It premiered in the Semaine de la Critique in Venice in 2015. “Light Years” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2016.

Shown at the 2016 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2016 · Film Archive