The filmmaker tries to communicate with the sheep living where his parents are buried.

Plays as part of our Short Docs 3: STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND Program

Director Tony Bull

Director's Statement:

My path to film has been circuitous.

Dad died when I was 12 and a family friend moved into the house to take care of me. Mum had died two years before. I was 14 when I first ran away from home. I'd skip school, take the train to London, and drift through the city's squats with my brother and his friends. We travelled with bands, ran with activists, and did drugs wherever we could find them. Life moved too quickly to think.

Everyone I knew was much older than me. We'd stay up late, drunk or high or neither, talking about poetry, philosophy, and the stories we loved and the ones we hated.

I started writing in a journal my brother had given me. "So your thoughts don't go to waste," he'd written on the inside cover. I still have that journal, including his message, but the rest of its pages are gone. Back then, I'd pour myself onto paper and then rip up what I wrote. I couldn't look at the stories I'd jotted down without feeling fear, disgust, and shame.

Ten years later I picked up a camera. I saw others differently through its lens: with love and curiosity, without judgment or fear of reprisal. And when they opened up to me as we made films together, I felt acceptance and understanding.

The sensation was similar on a wet, autumn day in 2019 when I travelled to the graveyard where my parents are buried. There, I saw a flock of sheep waiting for me, eyes wide before my own.

English subtitles.