(Pat Collins, 2023)

“Bothántaíocht” is an Irish word for which there is no obvious English equivalent. It translates (quite awkwardly) as “the act of visiting neighbours’ houses for pastime or gossip”. The word is distinct from “cuartaíocht” which, albeit translated as “the act of visiting”, is evidently more prosaic. Specifically, “cuartaíocht” is used as easily to describe a visit to the doctor as a visit to another country. “Bothántaíocht” on the other hand implies familiarity. A “bothánaí”, a frequenter of neighbours’ houses, arrives in the spirit of curiosity and intimacy: he or she has no need to be invited. In fact, the “bothánaí” is always invited. To be in a community where people are “ag bothántaíocht” (being and doing the action of “bothántaíocht”) is to be in a community where doors are always open. Pat Collins’ That They May Face the Rising Sun is, at its core, an exploration of this act of visiting.

Collins’ film is based on John McGahern’s 2003 novel of the same name. The film follows a year in the life of a 1980s’ rural Irish community, from the perspective of Joe and Kate Ruttledge. The couple, a writer Joe (Barry Ward) and a painter Kate (Anna Bederke), have left London and settled in the lakeside community where Joe grew up. As they work on their respective creative pursuits they are frequently visited by their neighbours: principally, Johnny (Sean McGinley), Patrick (Lalor Roddy), Jamesie (Phillip Dolan) and Bill (Brendan Conroy), all older men who come to the house of the couple seeking tea, cigarettes, news and company. Over the course of the year, the relationships and histories (both personal and societal) which underpin their neighbours’ lives are gradually revealed. The film’s emotional and narrative conclusion ultimately, gently revealing a traumatic legacy of emigration and its quiet devastation of rural Ireland.

This devastation is portrayed most powerfully by Sean McGinley, who plays Johnny, a character of tremulous pride and heartbreaking earnestness. His refrain of “alphabetical” (a catchphrase repeated at different significant moments throughout the story) alters from bemused to heartbreaking as the grim reality of his life in England is revealed. Phillip Dolan, Lalor Roddy and Brendan Conroy also give masterful performances. Lalor Roddy’s mercurial Patrick, in particular, is designed with a brutal honesty and quick temper that provide much of the narrative exigency of the film. Ward and Bederke’s performances are also praiseworthy, subtly conveying the depth of the relationship between Joe and Kate in looks and pauses that enrich the film with a sense that what remains unspoken is perhaps the most sacred of human connections. This wordlessness is contrasted elsewhere in the film – most notably in the letter to Johnny which Joe helps Jamesie to compose – where the unspoken is shown to bear its own powerful significance but which otherwise offers not comfort but truths too painful to articulate.

Collins picks up several of the formal and thematic threads of his previous work in this venture. He arrives at That They May Face the Rising Sun himself as a kind of cinematic “bothánaí”, visiting a world with which he is deeply familiar. As he has done before in the role of meticulously observing director, here he waits – and here we do with him – in patient anticipation of the stories that will reveal themselves. Cinematographer Richard Kendrick, who has previously worked with Collins on Silence and Song of Granite, also brings this spirit of gentle enquiry to the cinematography of the picture.

Kendrick often keeps the camera at a distance from the characters onscreen, choosing instead to frame them sitting in a group or within their environment. He frequently lingers on characters absorbed in personal self-reflection or contemplating some aspect of the natural world. In one particular scene we watch Bill stop to observe something in a hedgerow which only he can see. In another we see Johnny pedal his bike up the laneway as he calls back to Joe, insisting he will make his way home alone. We observe him, at a distance, brush a hand across his eyes. It is a moment of subtle allusion to the deeply private grief of his forced exile from the community. The distance that Kendrick maintains at these instances and in many others further enshrines the spirit of “bothántaíocht” which pervades the film. The characters of Collins’ films are neighbours, but they are not more than neighbours. There are unspoken rules and boundaries, certain facades that must be maintained, built up over generations, which they cannot cross either within the diegesis, or in their communal world of unspoken traditions and cultural etiquette. The inability of characters to transcend or transgress these social rules and conventions is central to the beauty and tragedy of the film.

The watchful distance established by Collins and rendered by Kendrick also recalls the work of Patrick Carey, who Collins has cited as an influence. Carey’s documentary films – in particular Oisín – present rural Ireland with a deference to ecological time and place. The opening scenes of That They May Face the Rising Sun depict a sunrise over the lake at the centre of the community. The sequence is unhurried, and an anthropocentric reading might allow us to consider it almost meditative. Nonetheless, it is filled with the chattering of birds, and the peaceful clamour of the thriving, bustling natural world. It instils in the viewer an awareness of the ecological richness of the community. However, it also foreshadows a statement mournfully intoned by Patrick on one of his visits to Joe and Kate’s home: “The country was walking with people then, soon it’ll be nothing but the water hens and the swans”. The quiet idyll of this lakeside community is indicative of a rapidly changing rural Ireland where poverty remains entrenched, but work has become scarce and the community is declining towards a point of entropy. It is a place where the practice of “bothántaíocht” will soon become extinct.

In his research on isolation and loneliness in rural Ireland, Adam Drazin has found that, from the 1990s, rural social isolation brought on by dramatic shifts in population structure and rural labour has resulted in the instigation of

social initiatives […] which expressed different expectations of belonging, and a changing sense of sameness and difference in what constitutes community. The new organisations implied the expectation of uni-generational sameness and were often gendered. In these initiatives, you socialise with people “like you”, meaning not so much sharing place, as similar age, gender, experience and interests. (2018: 545)

Collins’ film depicts the cultural moment just before this drastic sea change in social and community practices. The kinship between Joe and Kate and their neighbours ultimately highlights the degree to which the social change of the 1990s constituted a break in rural communities, a privileging of privacy and insularity over codependence and community building.

Collins is keen to stress the commonality between the younger, more cosmopolitan Joe and Kate, and their older neighbours. Close-ups in the film are reserved almost exclusively for hands at work: be that on the construction of a shed, the writing of a novel or the weaving of willow baskets. The film is emphatically fascinated by the act of creation. Kendrick’s cinematography reminds the viewer that it is not the work, so much as the practice of living and working in a place that binds a community. The intimacy of these shots and the attention given to work and the act of creating also recalls Patrick Kavanagh (another of Collins’ influences and about whom he is currently writing a radio play). Of Kavanagh’s writing, Collins notes the attention to detail, stating that for the writer “attention is a form of love to a certain extent”. In many ways, we might view That They May Face the Rising Sun as Irish cinema’s reincarnated reply to Patrick Kavanagh’s “The One”, in which the poet turns his attention to

A humble scene in a backward place

Where no one important ever looked (1964: 229)

To catalogue the profusion of wildflower “by a cut-away bog” so lovingly, like Kavanagh Collins makes sacred the most mundane acts of living through careful, loving attention.

This sanctification of the everyday has always been a feature of Collins’ work, but it should not be mistaken for the idealisation or romanticisation of his subjects or subject matter. Collins does not shy away from the presentation of hard truths on screen. Like Lalor Roddy’s Patrick, he reveals uncomfortable realities about rural Ireland that trouble softer collective cultural imaginings of that place. However, Collins’ magnificent artistry resides in how he presents these truths. He presents a portrait of rural Ireland which is unfalteringly honest but unfailingly empathetic. That They Will Face the Rising Sun presents the actuality of community and place, worn smooth by careful attention.

The film provides further proof, if any were still necessary, that Pat Collins is one of the most accomplished and exciting directors at work in Ireland today. He is capable of portraying personal and national histories with a breadth of sensitivity and intelligence that lays bare the evident universal importance of his intimate local narratives.