Film Review: Tomás Hardiman undergoes a journey to healing in The Days of Trees

Tomas Hardiman in The Days of Trees

• The Days of Trees 
• ★★★★☆
• Cinema release

The Days of Trees (16s) is a deceptively straightforward documentary in which the director, Alan Gilsenan (Meetings with Ivor), points his camera at his long-time collaborator Tomás Hardiman and encourages him to talk.

Now in his sixties, with a successful career in Irish theatre behind him, Hardiman explains how psychotherapy has recently excavated dormant memories of child sex abuse in his native Tuam, a cataclysmic event that goes some way to explaining his choices and behaviours later in life.

But ‘it’s risky to tell the truth’, Hardiman says; he has no interest in naming names, or seeking revenge or legal redress; he simply wants to explore his experience of discovery as part of his journey to becoming who he truly is.

It’s harrowing at times, and especially when Hardiman reads aloud from the journals he has obsessively kept since childhood, but there’s a Zen quality to Hardiman that is hugely affecting, and the film offers as much laughter as tears as he talks his way towards a long-desired healing.