Father of the Man

Father of the Man comes from my love of both verbal and visual poetry, and my desire to combine the two. It follows in the tradition of films like Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, but also draws from my own past in a personal poem about growing up and moving on. The title comes from a line from Wordsworth, and his poetry is used throughout, along with other visual cues to ongoing themes within romantic poetry.

I wanted to make something deeply sensitive and emotional, something that followed the process of memories forming in the brain, as opposed to following more traditional coherent film logic. Nature and environment tell us about the inner states of the characters as much as their actions, and what is seen on screen is never meant to be an absolute image of a reality, but more a distorted impression engraved in the mind of a young mind trying to make sense of his life. The process of time reforms and organises memories in ways that are not always true to the actual events that took place, but they always hold an inner truth about the state of mind of the subject.

For me the characters of the Father, the child, and the man, are the archetypes of what they are representing as well as living breathing people in themselves. They represent the on going inner conflict between playfulness and maturity, innocence and experience, the child and the man. The conflict that occurs in the heart of everyone, and the balance one must find between the two find harmony.