As He Lay Falling
All Films • 15-Jan-2018
A man with an unknown past takes up room and board in the remote Scottish Highlands on the property of a woman named Bronte and her husband William. It’s not clear what he’s left behind, but what he’s found is a place to sleep and there's work to be done. For awhile, his presence is tolerated as long as he fulfills his labor: digging peat, shuttling it into town. But as the days pass without end in site, tension builds between the three, particularly with William who's had enough of the visitor. Director Ian Waugh is a fiercely intelligent filmmaker who parses out character details incrementally and with great care. Similar in atmosphere and setting to his previous short "Strayed" (which we featured in 2014), "As He Lay Falling" offers an impressive mix of vivid close-ups and stunning vistas. The visitor, Georgios, is an outsider and treated as such (a solo trip to the local bar finds a drunken Scotsman glaring and calling him gypsy), but William is also not native, an incomer from England. So where do the lines get drawn? A penetrating short about identity, self-worth, and displacement.
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