Director: Pat Collins
Rural Ireland in the 1980s unfolds at its own unhurried pace in That They May Face the Rising Sun, director Pat Collins's adaptation of John McGahern's celebrated novel.
What is That They May Face the Rising Sun about?
Joe and Kate Ruttledge have left the city behind to settle beside a lake in the west of Ireland, and the film follows the rhythm of the seasons through their small community: neighbors who drop by for tea, farmers tending livestock, funerals and weddings marking the calendar. Barry Ward and Anna Bederke anchor the couple at the center of this world, while a supporting cast including Lalor Roddy, Sean McGinley, and Ruth McCabe fills out the surrounding village with its quiet eccentrics and old grudges. There is no single plot driving the story forward; instead, the film accumulates meaning through repetition and observation, letting ordinary conversations and chores carry the emotional weight. Cattle are bought and sold, boats go out on the water, and the light changes over the fields as one year gives way to the next. It is a portrait of a place and its people more than a sequence of events, built from the small rituals that give rural life its structure.
Cast & crew
Barry Ward brings a settled warmth to Joe Ruttledge, a man who has chosen this slower life deliberately, and Anna Bederke matches him with a grounded, watchful presence as Kate. Around them, veteran Irish character actors including Sean McGinley, Ruth McCabe, and Lalor Roddy give the village its texture, each carrying decades of unspoken history in small gestures rather than exposition.
Context & significance
John McGahern's 2002 novel, on which the film is based, is widely regarded as a landmark of modern Irish literature, and director Pat Collins is known for documentary work that favors patience and close observation over conventional narrative drive. That sensibility carries directly into this adaptation, which trusts long takes of landscape and daily labor to do much of the storytelling. The film premiered to strong festival notice and has been praised for its faithfulness to the novel's meditative tone rather than compressing it into a more conventional dramatic arc.
Where & how to watch
That They May Face the Rising Sun is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, presented in a Farsi-language interface built for the Iranian diaspora, with Persian dubbing included for this title.