- A look at the life of Lawrence MacEwen who has farmed the Isle of Muck since the 1960s.
- The hilly island of Muck, just off the west coast of Scotland, has been owned by the McEwen family for more than a century. After decades of devoting himself to caring for the island, Lawrence McEwen has now passed it on to his son. Lawrence still takes a cold bath every day, and writes in his diary-though the pages are not as full as they once were. Days in the life of this formal but cheerful man unfold to the rhythm of the island in Dutch filmmaker Cindy Jansen's calm, observational shots. Lawrence hugs the cows, drives cattle with his grandchildren, and reads out extracts from his diaries that span decades, applying the same methodical approach to his notations of wind directions and deaths. The younger generation is taking its own path, and Lawrence must accept that he is reaching the end of his own. In the growing awareness that the future belongs to others, he casts his gaze back in time, reciting the poetry and tide tables that he learned by heart as a child.—IDFA
- In Prince of Muck, retired patriarch, Lawrence MacEwen, is beginning to live out his final days. As Laird of the Isle of Muck, it has been his mission in life to preserve the fragile society on this Inner Hebridean island, so it may pass to his son, Colin, and future generations. His Sisyphean efforts seem to have worked... but at what cost to him?
Directed by Cindy Jansen (Auld Lang Syne, International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2015), Prince of Muck is a beautifully realised, cinematic documentary about a man struggling to accept he no longer controls his son, his life, nor the isle he so loves. In Prince of Muck, Dutch Director Jansen brings a cool, seemingly detached 'outside eye' to a classic Scottish scenario, as a Laird surveys his Life and Land.
Just as the themes and exact cinematic language in Jansen's first mid-length documentary film, Auld Lang Syne, reveal complex family ties at play, here too, the carefully constructed narrative gives space to inter-generational tensions, to slow-burn, dramatic effect.
Prince of Muck is not just about a family's history on an island, but rather an example of a much more universal story. The tone and rhythm of the film are one of 'distant involvement', there is no explanatory voice-over and no questions are heard. In connection with the closed manner of relaying the story in image and sound, the advantage that comes with this positioning gives the viewer room to project his or her own story onto the film.
Prince of Muck starts off as a portrait of an eccentric man, but slowly rises above his family's history on this particular island, to become a classical rendition of interdependence, a simultaneously transient, yet deep experience, of a man slowly accepting the eternity that beckons him and, we ultimately recognise, awaits us all.
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