My Ain Folk

Jamie's maternal grandmother dies and the two brothers are separated: Tommy is taken to a children's home while Jamie goes to his other grandmother and his uncle. He is not welcome there either. The house is silent, nobody explains anything to him, and there are beatings in between. The child is thrown from one place to another and finds nothing of his own in any of them. The time is after 1945, in a Scottish mining town. It is the second film of Bill Douglas's trilogy; the director is telling his own childhood, and the three films together are counted among the hardest autobiographical works in British cinema. Fifty-five minutes with almost no speech. Black and white, static shots, long silences. Stephen Archibald, who plays Jamie, was not a professional actor; Douglas found him at a bus stop and used him in all three films. The film does not explain the pain, it only shows it.