Childhood on Blasket island inspires films

Filmmaker Simon Hambrook tells Sharon Ní Chonchuir how a hippie upbringing off the Kerry coast has become a source of creativity

CHILDHOOD memories are precious to us all. They give us a sense of where we came from and the people and places that shaped the adults we have become. Imagine how it might feel if your childhood memories consisted of life with your hippie parents on the Great Blasket Island at the end of the 1970s. Can you picture how such a childhood might have impacted on the person you are today? These are the questions filmmaker Simon Hambrook is grappling with as he makes the second in a series of films about his early life on the Great Blasket Island. He made his first film, the 12- minute The Isle of My Youth in April of last year and it has since appeared at the New Designers Exhibition in London and at Keswick Film Festival. Now he is in the process of making a follow-up film called The Isle of My Heart .

“This all started when I began to write a book about my family’s life on the island about a year and a half ago,” says Simon, who at that time was living in Torquay in England. “I realised I missed Ireland and the island so much. It ignited my desire to return and made me want to make a film about what the island means to me.”