“When God made time, he made enough of it,” Brendan used to say to me. God rest him – he was a pillar of St Dominic’s in London, one of many Irish men and women who came to London in the 1980s looking for work, but never forgetting “the old country” – its unhurried pace of life, seasonal rhythms and easy hospitality.
Pat Collins’s 2023 film That They May Face the Rising Sun is set in that time and culture: not much happens beyond the everyday. The camera gently slows us down as it lingers on the lake and hills of a remote farming hamlet, and on simple scenes of meals and agriculture. It is a world away from the economic success and aggressive secularisation of modern Ireland.
