Rose reckons a family’s like a constellation – all connected, hanging up there, in the infinite. Stars can feel each other, even if some died millions of years ago. Even if they’re light years apart. Over the course of one long day, Rose’s fractured family pulls itself back into its constellation to face the implications of their legacy.

The film features the acting debut of singer/songwriter Beth Orton, alongside acting veteran Muhammet Uzuner and a cast of newcomers from the West Country. With recordings from Chris Watson and music by Eric Chenaux, the film has played at festivals around the world.

Watch LIGHT YEARS on the BFI player.

‘Joining a select but honourable lineage of British works that display an acute sense of the potencies of place, weather and the edgelands (active agents in the telling rather than simple background), Light Years is at once a quietly insistent rites-of-passage piece, a subtle meditation of the implications and ripple effects of mental distress and a lyrical celebration of childhood resilience, imagination and common cause in the face of parental absence, whether locational or emotional. With excellent use of painting, still photographs and a genuinely evocative sound-scape, it explores the handing on of experience and the fundamental unknowability at the heart of families and between generations, what might be thought of as the intimate otherness of people (sensitively caught in the ventriloquising witness of a silent night window familial encounter). Both a heightened realist study of regional lives and (be)longing and a dream of childhood epiphanies among the extraordinary-ordinary days of the suburban /rural borderlands, Light Years shines with an artist’s pleasure in associative narrative and place-making. A fable of being lost and found, it’s a journey into the woods – and out again – that deserves to be widely seen, and striking evidence of a welcome new ensemble of talent, full of conviction in the possibilities of their art’. Gareth Evans, The Whitechapel Gallery.