I Could Read The Sky

Synopsis

An ailing old Irish man (Healy) lives out his final days. As death approaches, the man's memories drift backwards and forwards to recall various events, both pleasant and not so pleasant: his arrival in England from his rural Irish home, the various back-breaking and low-paid jobs he is forced to take to eke out his meager living, the different paths that the lives of his brothers and sisters follow, and the death of his mother and father whose funerals lured him back to his homeland.

Taken from the photographic novel by Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke, Nicola Bruce's innovative, melancholic, and deeply moving film is a small gem, as much informed by literature as it is by cinema. Made on the smallest of budgets, Bruce utilises her visionary skills to profound effect, creating a narrative which skillfully weaves between past and present, charting the correlation between each and raising spectral observations about the unforgiving nature of memory.