A quietly contemplative, deliberately paced tale of renewal and redemption, A Year in Mooring sails smoothly, if not downright defiantly, far beyond the commercial mainstream. Variety
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Chris Eyre entered filmmaking through still photography. Reviews of A Year In Mooring comment on the role the landscape plays – this makes sense to me since Eyre’s first inspiration as an artist was the landscape which surrounded Klamath Falls, where he grew up. His first photos were of hills and sky.
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Here’s an except from Brendan McCauley’s review of Chris Eyre’s sixth feature, starring Josh Lucas.
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While A Year in Mooring is reminiscent of some recent “man-alone” American films, such as Into the Wild and 127 Hours, and the lonely drunken stumbling of the Young Mariner even brings to mind parts of There Will Be Blood. With its slow pace, sparse dialogue, and contemplative photography it’s like the quiet Zen cinema of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, or the painstaking spiritual fare of Frenchman Robert Bresson.
I hereby claim A Year In Mooring as an Oregon film, based on the contribution of the director, Oregonian Chris Eyre.
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1 Peter Vanderwall // May 15, 2011 at 12:44 pm
Oregon resident Peter Vanderwall’s original screenplay was inspired by his experiences living aboard a sailboat in a marina on the Columbia River. Vanderwall first met Eyre at a screening at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. During preproduction in Traverse City, Michigan, Vanderwall rewrote the screenplay, changing the locale from the Columbia River to Lake Michigan.
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