My Way Home

Jamie leaves the children's home and moves in with his father's mother. He works in a mine, then at a tailor's. He holds on to neither and speaks to nobody. Then he is conscripted and sent with the air force to Egypt. There he meets a man called Robert. Robert wants nothing from him, is simply there, and talks about reading. For the first time in his life Jamie stops pitying himself. It is the last film of the Bill Douglas trilogy. Where the first two are dark and silent, this one opens a door; the release comes not through a great event but through somebody simply being there. In Douglas's own life that person really existed. Seventy-two minutes. Stephen Archibald, who played Jamie throughout the trilogy, is the same person here. The story speaks little again and explains no feeling, but this time the ending is not closed.