I Could Read The Sky (1999) - Synopsis

I Could Read the Sky (1999)

I Could Read The Sky (1999) is a film about music, madness memory, love and loss, a haunting story of immigration.

An ambitious production by Nichola Bruce, I Could Read The Sky (1999) is imaginatively adapted from the original photographic novel by Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke. Recently published to rave reviews, it explores the sense of identity, loss and exile. It is the moving story of an old man living in a bedsit in London, remembering his life, growing up on the West Coast of Ireland and his journey to London.

This film unravels the strange twisting drama of a working man's life.

It moves with a simple, flowing, lyrical story4elling from a decaying rural past to a vividly modern present, driven by a dynamic music soundtrack that draws from both eras. It is the state of memory that the film provokes, not memory as re-enactment but as texture. The film gets to the essence of how we remember. Memory as fragments, as details and layers, memory that comes at you out of the dark. From behind closed eyes, with its abstractions of light and form and sudden moments of precise cladty, taking us on an inward, visually extraordinary ]abynnthine journey to the film's end.

"This film will resonate especially strongly with the large Irish community in Britain, for whom it will play as a requiem for an entire generation of immigrants. Similarly, in Ireland, it can be expected to touch most who see it. After the Galway world premiere, the reaction varied between those who were greatly moved by it and others who perhaps expected a more conventional and less challenging film."