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).
