Duck Daze

2019, 15 minutes

Johnina seeks revenge on her childhood abuser and the community that enabled him, with the help of a duck.

Community outcast Johnina (Daniela Nardini) makes a disquieting return to her homeland on the Isle of Lewis, to attend the funeral of her father. When she steps back into her childhood home, Johnina is reunited with her estranged mother (Dolina MacLennan), reigniting a tense relationship in which neither woman chooses to speak the other’s language. As Johnina slides back into her past, a dark and buried trauma begins to resurface and in order to acknowledge and confront it, Johnina shapes her trauma into the form of a quaking, flapping duck. Johnina’s unexpected presence in the tightly knit island community is punctuated by whispers and uneasy glances. A film spoken in English and Scottish Gaelic, Duck Daze is a dark tale from the bleak and beautiful peat lands, in which community and congregation are intertwined in their strength, and also their complicity.

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