That They May Face the Rising Sun is set in the late 1970s in rural Ireland, just before the communications revolution vastly changed the dynamics of these small, close knit communities.
Joe and Kate Ruttledge, having returned from London five years earlier to set up home near where Joe grew up, are now deeply embedded in their small, lakeside community. To a great extent this film is a portrait of a community and a way of life in rural Ireland that remained largely unchanged for many decades until the coming of radio, television and phones. In that society, neighbours helped each other with all the big jobs of the farming calendar - lambing, shearing, saving hay, cutting turf, etc - and visited each other’s houses to share news and talk by the fire. Complex, but mutually understood codes of manners determined people’s obligations to each other.
In scenes of beauty and truth and through the keen and sensitive eyes of the Ruttledges, the drama of a year and a half in the lives of these memorable characters that circle the lake unfolds in action, rituals of work, family dynamics and social observances. We are lulled by the benign, repetitive rhythms and cadences of rural life: Joe is a writer and his wife Kate is an artist, having left behind a small art gallery in London run by her business partner. A couple in the early 70’s, Jamesie and Mary Murphy are regular callers to the Ruttledges, as is Jamesie’s brother, Johnny, on his annual trips home from London where he is a reluctant exile. Patrick Ryan, confirmed bachelor, odd jobs worker and a local chameleon, is Johnny’s oldest friend and Bill Evans slaves for a local farmer, such was his misfortune of being born out of wedlock, fetching water daily from the lake to run the house as if it was the 1930’s. Joe’s uncle, The Shah, runs the local garage and is about to embark on a late life adventure, rounding out this unmistakeable cast of characters whose lives the film chronicles.
By the film’s close we feel that we have been introduced, with deceptive simplicity, to a complete representation of existence - an enclosed world has been transformed into an Everywhere.
That They May Face the Rising Sun is based on the novel of the same name by celebrated Irish writer, John McGahern. It is a deeply rooted portrait of a lost Ireland, with a tangible, authentic sense of place in an elegiac and poetic exploration of language, landscape and life itself.