Despite being destined at best for the sake specialist events and cultural webs, shortsmaker and storyboard artist Nichola Bruce's gold medal perform, "I Could Know the Skies," is an impressive slice of borderline avant-garde cinema, visualizing the memories, regrets and dreams of an grey Irishman dying in London. Cool tech work, mixing dusting and transferred video, is a big added to in maintaining audience concentration.
An unnamed Irish man (Dermot Healy), all sandy-white hair and straggly beard, sits rotting in a dingy, single-room apartment in London. Mostly heard in voiceover, but occasionally spoken direct to camera, his meandering, semi-poetic reminiscences of growing up on the west coast of Ireland and then moving round England as a declasse laborer are mirrored by abstract imagery and brief dialogue scenes featuring people from his past.
Though the film, based on an award-winning book, digs deep into the fatalistic melancholy at the heart of the Irish soul, it steers resolutely clear of history, politics and Anglo-Celtic differences. It's more a remembrance of things lost, an expatriate's free-form diary. Juxtaposing words and imagery, pic essentially falls into a category of Channel Four/British Film Institute–supported Brit cinema by directors like Tony Harrison ("Prometheus") and Patrick Keiller ("London"), though more dreamlike and free-flowing, and eschewing their social/political observation.
Film has no narrative, more a long emotional arc, starting with a batch of memories from which the old man summons first family and friends, dispersed by poverty, then a measure of hope and, finally, some kind of contentment ("In the morning light, I let it go"). Figure of his late wife, Maggie (Maria Doyle Kennedy), runs through the film as an emotional anchor. Stephen Rea pops up in a puzzling cameo.
Healy is first-rate as the man with only death to look forward to. Behind-camera talent includes ace d.p. Seamus McGarvey, smooth effects work that uses morphing and overlapping images, and a varied and flavorsome music soundtrack including Irish artists Sinead O'Connor and fiddle player Martin Hayes.