Man of Aran  

Man of Aran  

Robert J. Flaherty, UK, 1934, 77’ 

A turbulent journey through time to a fishing village in the Aran Islands, where the sea is both the main source of survival and a relentless enemy.  

With live music accompaniment by Polona Janežič!  

The influential American documentary pioneer and his family spent three years making this celebrated film. Life on the Aran islands in the 1930’s was hard. Families were forced to fight against the elements for their livelihoods. It was the custom of the men to await the annual migration of basking sharks. If caught, they would provide a family with enough oil for a year, but to catch them meant setting sail in a flimsy boat. Could it protect the fishermen against the pounding force of the ocean?
Although the film featured real-life islanders and drew upon factual elements of their lives, Flaherty wasn’t afraid to bend the rules to obtain the best results: the family at the centre of Man of Aran aren’t actually related and some events were re-created for dramatic purposes.  

“Regardless of whether the traditions depicted in Man of Aran are authentic to the era in which it was created, the perilous situations in which the protagonists are placed remain as compelling as they were nearly eighty years ago. Although Flaherty’s use of reconstruction and dramatisation prevents Man of Aran being considered a true anthropological study, it is nonetheless a stunning record of a way of life that was disappearing even as it was being filmed.” – Kasandra O’Connell, Head of the IFI Irish Film Archive 

Robert J. Flaherty (1884–1951) was a writer and filmmaker, who is often referred to as the father of documentary film. He grew up in Canada, where he explored and photographed vast regions of the country’s northern territory. Nanook of the North (1922) was his first film, known as one of the best silent-era documentaries, and it became an international success, setting the standard for non-fiction filmmaking in the documentary movement of the 1930s.  

Polona Janežič is a musician, keyboard player, and writer, member of the bands Melodrom, Katalena and Narat, and composer and performer for storytelling events and theatre performances. She also composes music for cinema. A recent interest of hers is the live scoring of silent films.