– The Long Way Home review: Heart-warming exploration of an Englishman’s love affair with Irelandtold his wife, Patsy, that he had bought them a holiday home in a country beginning with the letter “i”, her heart leapt with joy. “Oh Italy – you mean Italy,” she recalls early in the heart-warming and illuminating David Puttnam: The Long Way Home . He did not mean Italy.
But the heart of the doc concerns Puttnam’s relationship with Ireland. That it might be good for his soul to escape the bustle of London occurred to him while making Local Hero in Aberdeenshire in 1983. Having scoured both Scotland and Ireland, he found himself in west Cork. “I climbed over a load of brambles,” he said, remembering his first fateful glimpse of the river Ilen. “I saw that . That was exactly what I had in my mind’s eye.
That same decency has informed Puttnam’s feelings towards Ireland and his fascination with the Famine, which he regards, in essence, as Britain’s original sin when it comes to its dynamic with its closest colony. Puttnam has mentored a new generation of film-makers through his Puttnam Scholarship Programme. He has also become one of the most outspoken critiques of the folly of Brexit and its corrosive impact on interactions between Britain and Ireland. “I watched my country of birth going into self-destruction,” he sighs.