Perennial Light

Writer, Director and Editor: Colin Hickey

Animator: Paolo Chianta

Perennial Light is a strange, haunting film, written, directed and edited by Colin Hickey. Shot in black and white it tells its story without dialogue, relying on patterns of images and sound. Juliet Martin supervises an evocative soundscape, often consisting of a repeated six-note musical phrase, interspersed with the sound of a cow bell, or bursts of Spanish classical music. There natural sounds too which are strangely at odds with the visuals. So, for instance, we hear howling wind while watching a peaceful sunlit scene A repeated section where the camera wanders along a deeply wooded path is overlaid by the calls of birds we’d associate with somewhere more exotic than rural Ireland. Perennial Light also makes use of simple hand-drawn animation (Paolo Chianta). The images are appealing and childlike but again not always easy to interpret.

Early on, images of a mother’s pregnant belly and shots of a full moon clearly signal the passing months before a child is born. What seems at first to be the story of one child turns out to be the story of two, as we see a young girl and boy who become friends. Clara Rosa Hickey plays the girl, Finn O’Donovan the boy who is often lost in thought, troubled. There’s a repeated shot taken from far above the ground of the two children running through a cemetery. A woman (Muriel Pitton) works the soil in a garden. Someone has lost a parent – perhaps both parents, we think. There’s a motif of skulls running through a section of the animation. Is the boy Spanish? A close up of the old rifle he likes to play with shows the suggestive inscription ‘Guernica’.

The youngsters turn into teenagers with Jack O’Mahoney as the silent young man and Ciara Kirby the blonde young woman. We get glimpses of her spray painting graffiti and later watch them journeying towards each other – he on a skateboard, she on a bike. They are loners, it seems, meeting in secret places. Then there’s a sequence of fireworks, gracefully suggesting a sexual relationship blossoms. Then there’s another pregnant belly – is it the girl this time? And who is the dark haired woman who is tending to flowers in the garden? There are a pair of very fine donkeys.

We hear an orchestral arrangement of Schubert’s ‘Leiermann’ from Winterreise, but its significance is opaque.

The boy is now a man, played by Colin Hickey himself. We see him trudging through the boat yard to join men silently drinking mugs of tea. Shots of a ship lying on its side. Is this the key to the mystery?

It’s hard to follow the film’s timeline: it all has the feeling of a dream. Does the black and white signify the film is entirely composed of fragments of memory? Perennial Light ultimately feels like a deep personal, lyrical filmic autobiography. But it’s one that remains enigmatic to the end.

Perennial Light is released on Apple TV / Amazon / Google Play on 4 May 2026.