Land of Winter

Land of Winter is my second short film in a series that explores growth, loss, and man’s place within nature. It follows on from Father of the Man which is a film about a young man who is struggling to come to terms with the loss of his idyllic childhood, and his longing to return to a more innocent and simpler time. Our film thematically picks up here, only instead of being about a fall from grace, we see the aftermath: a young man beyond the point of return, trapped in the routine of his alcoholism, and incapable of change, brief flashes of drunken optimism take him out onto the street, but his own nature and trauma tragically send him home alone in a painfully predictable manner, the past weighing heavy on his shoulders.

The name comes from the classical latin term for Ireland, Hibernia, which roughly translates to ‘land of winter’, a name amassed in a great sense of mystery and mythology, speaking of a land unconquered, unbounded, and shrouded in a perennial winter. It is also in reference to our source material, James Joyce’s The Dead, which closes with snow falling across the whole of Ireland leaving no area untouched by winter, and causing the protagonist, Gabriel, to have an almost out of body experience where he envisions snow falling in different locations, becoming aware of all the land and forming a profound emotional connection with the snow; the film is inspired by this short story, and Gabriel’s epiphany is translated into the twenty-first century, in a modernisation of older material in the spirit Joyce was famous for. Joyce uses words that are evocative and familiar, speaking of treeless hills, dark plains, all things associated with death and the underworld, on our journey we cross a bog which is also something commonly related to the land of the dead, the Shannon river becomes the Styx, and the snow the souls of the dead. This is the genius of Joyce and his understanding of language to create feelings that are beyond intellect, poising our journey westward as not only a geographical one across Ireland, but a mythological timeless one reminiscent of Orpheus or Odysseus. This is something that we also try to achieve in our film, only visually; using haunted ruins, ethereal fogs, and elegant snowfall to evoke this profound feeling of moving between worlds.

The other thing explored in the film is Gabriel’s encounter with Polly. The two are thrust together by circumstance, Polly wishing to escape her lairy group of obnoxious workmates, and Gabriel simply looking for a respite to his own thoughts. They are seemingly opposites, Polly being explosive and dynamic, and Gabriel mysterious and sullen, but none-the-less they form an instant connection, even leaving together to find the next place. For a brief period of time it seems like we are observing a boy meets girl story as Gabriel begins to warm up and even share his inner world with Polly, however it is not meant to be as Gabriel’s anxiety and fear leads to self sabotage. As Gabriel is left alone at the Ha’ Penny Bridge suddenly we realise that this is what the story has been about all along, the marks left on us by the past and how we too in a way are ghosts of our own. The intense short relationship with Polly, and its failure, becomes a microcosmic event reflecting the much more dooming loss he suffered eighteen months ago. We get the feeling that Gabriel’s existence is a series of events like this, and his longing for more his final damnation, for like Sisyphus carrying his boulder he is doomed to failure before he has even set out. Finally as snow begins to fall we find this synchronicity between external and internal events and in a lonely churchyard at the end of our journey, we learn why Gabriel’s world is a wintery one.