International UK Premiere
Showing @ Cameo 1, Wed 22 June @ 17:45 & Thu 23 June @ 20:15
Paul Fraser/ Ireland/ 2010/ 88 min
Memory is a futile thing, when do your memories start, how does your brain decide that those first steps, or your first word is something that can slip into the oblivion with the dark matter? Our memories are a continual revision and reorganisation of perception rather than a straight forward account of events; sensations and emotions cloud and manipulate it. But when we’re desperate to cling onto the memory of a loved one, our feelings and thoughts become even more murky. Such is the topic of Somers Town writer Paul Fraser’s directorial debut My Brothers.
With the impending death of there father from an unnamed illness that’s slowly killing him, his three sons Noel (Timmy Creed) 17, Paudie (Paul Courtney) 11, and baby of the family Scwally (TJ Griffin) end up going on a wet, obstacle ridden journey to replace their father’s cheapo watch from an arcade machine by the seaside after Noel gets into a fight and it breaks.
Written and directed by Fraser, the feel of My Brothers is very intimate and personal with the kind of astute eye you’d expect from the writer of Somers Town. However, like Somers Town it’s the over-earnest tinge, pushed on by the tepid soundtrack, that stops My Brothers from entering the realms of greatness. That said, the nuanced performances of all three boys and some moments of painful power in the script, for example when Swally utters at the start: “If daddy dies in the holidays, do we still get time off school when we go back?”, are what make this a successful picture. With the three sons at different stages in their lives, all of whom are going to remember their father in different ways, the way the journey and the crux of the dying father back home entwine and entangle with wider ideas about memory, mortality and death bring My Brothers to a strong and hard to watch finale.