Skye-born film-maker Johnny Barrington got a Bafta nomination in 2013 for his short film Tumult and now he opens the Edinburgh film festival with his feature debut: a whimsical coming-of-age drama with a touch of Bill Forsyth, set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. It is a beautiful, remote landscape whose sweeping emptiness is interestingly used by Barrington and his director of photography Ruben Woodin Dechamps as a blank canvas for gentle flights of fancy.
The result is a likeable, sweet-natured and often funny film, though straying a bit close to away-with-the-fairies tweeness and a bit uncertain on the subject of whether organised religion is bad or not. Louis McCartney and Ella Lily Hyland give very intelligent and sympathetic performances as Dondo and Sas, two high-school kids in the little town of Uig. Dondo lives with his widowed mum Veronica (Victoria Balnaves), in unresolved grief since his fisherman dad was lost at sea one year before, with the body never found. Sas is a very smart girl hoping to study medicine, idly strumming her electric guitar while gazing at a poster of Jimi Hendrix and realising, a little to her chagrin, that she might have feelings for Dondo, her childhood mate, interestingly weird, and obsessed with surfing.
