Filmed by its directors Gerard Bryan and David Rafique over 10 years, this amiable documentary profiling north Devon residents who live off-grid perhaps needed that much time to ripen in order to create a sense of narrative progress. Otherwise, it might have played like a series of cinematic snapshots of randomly selected folks who have little in common apart from a certain bolshie-minded self-sufficiency and love of rural life. That and a willingness to open up for the camera a tiny bit and let the directors snoop around their (mostly) messy but cosy homes.
No one here is what you might call a hermit, but being at ease with living alone seems to be a common trait among most of them. A few find themselves in relationships at one point or another, but their enthusiasm for other people varies greatly. When first met, eco-warrior Chris appears to think of himself as a lone wolf who’s only temporarily shacked up with younger woman Emma. By the end of the movie, they’ve got two lovely kids, despite Chris’s somewhat troubling assertions that he likes his old single life and that he seems distinctly unsure about this parenting malarkey. Similarly, adorably cantankerous Amy pairs up for a little while with sweet-natured villager Sue, but that doesn’t seem to last long. At the end, Amy muses on whether she lives off-grid because she’s difficult, or the other way around. Octogenarian Pamela on the other hand seems serenely content with her life of solitude, writing poetry and pottering about her home.
In the end, this film is about much more than just its subjects’ love lives. It’s also a shimmering celebration of the wild, mostly treeless Devon landscape, and we spend many minutes of screen time contemplating the wind rifling through grass or light moving across the terrain. Lashings of plinkety strumming and wry lyrics by folk musician Cosmo Sheldrake adds a rich, whimsical texture that’s quite intoxicating – a tipsiness that suits the story strand about rogue publican Steve and his epic lock-ins and battles with the authorities. That is, if they can find the pub in the first place.
