I IS FOR IRELAND
Donal Foreman was raised by his mother in Ireland, barely in touch with his biological father, American filmmaker Arthur McCaig based in France. After Arthur died, Donal, now in his 30s and a filmmaker himself, finally got to have a glimpse into the life of his estranged parent whose whole career was built around documentaries on the Irish struggle.
An earnest portrait of a family, as dysfunctional as any other in our time, and as normal, as any other. What made me most happy about this film is that Donal seems to have a very evolved, wise approach to his relationship with his father which is too late to fix or redeem. And he’s not interested in grievances, instead, he looks at the ways they are alike and different, and at the ways the two existences informed each other while sustained in two parallel universes. And, of course, the way that the political situation shapes an artist and a human. “It’s not just that you and i see differently, we belong to different times. We came into the world […] at different political moments. You began when certain things seemed possible, when armed struggle was an image you could believe in. I began in the wake of the failure of these movements, the failure of those images, with no clear way forward’.
The Image You Missed, 2018
Director: Dónal Foreman
