Filmmaker Eamon Bourke lost his mother, Sue, when he was just three years old. He’s never been able to access any memories of her. When his father, John, decides to sell their family home - a remote cottage in the Lake District - Eamon returns to help clear Rose Cottage and prepare it for sale. In the process he unearths untold stories and discovers all sorts of objects left by his mother, including clothes, artefacts, diaries, poems, slides and old video footage. Most precious of all is a box of cassette tapes that he finds in the garage. Some of the tapes are unspooled and broken, so Eamon repairs them. They contain pure treasure: his mother’s voice and whole family scenes, recorded and preserved. These are the memories that Eamon searched for, for so long, but didn’t have.
He learns that Sue used to record voice messages for family and friends on these tapes, because with three young children she was too busily occupied to write. On the tapes you hear Sue interacting playfully with her children, confessing to finding life tough as a mother, singing songs, and so much more. At one point she asks Eamon to sing her a song and that’s what the film is: Eamon’s attempt to sing his mother a song from a distance of forty years. She died in 1983.
The cause of Sue’s death has always been a mystery, but the family realise she could be a victim of the infected blood scandal, potentially from receiving contaminated blood during the director’s emergency caesarean birth. The cassettes capture Sue describing her unexplained illness as it progresses; “quite inexplicably I’ve managed to contract hepatitis… I am a lurid shade of yellow”. Days after that recording, she slipped into a coma. Harrowingly, Eamon finds and repairs a tape labelled ‘Children’s tape for Sue’, made by a neighbour who is encouraging the children to shout for their mother in the hope that playing it to Sue might rouse her from her sleep. It didn’t. The family have now registered with the Infected Blood Inquiry.
The Solway explores the trauma of losing a parent in early childhood and includes interviews with Eamon’s two sisters. Through animation and the intricate layering of archive The Solway captures and depicts the ‘forever wound’ caused by losing a mother at such a young age.
It’s also a celebration of how the family carries on in the wake of such grief and the bountiful love that remains. It’s partly a love song for John, who heroically raises all three children alone, and sees them thrive.
As Eamon lovingly pieces together his family's archive for the film, he’s gathering the fragments of his own broken heart, making meaning from them, and preparing to say goodbye.
The Solway embraces grief and letting go. Just as Rose Cottage was full of poetry, art and song, Eamon invites other artists to embellish this story and their music and remarkable creations imbue the film with a rare magic.