Writer/Director - Natasha Waugh
Writer/Producer - Jon Hozier-Byrne
Executive Producer - Dearbhla Walsh
DoP - Tommy Fitzgerald
Editor - Eamonn Clearly

Some films, I find, are made significantly more impactful by virtue of a unique sense of time and place. The unknowingly-filmed German soldiers marching through Italian streets in Rome, Open City, for instance, or the roar of the crowd in Jafar Panahi’s Offside, unwitting extras cheering during the real-world football match depicted in the film. There is a wonderful sense of immediacy, of significance, conveyed in capturing the flavour of a unique moment in time.

During pre-production on this video, the endlessly talented director Natasha Waugh and I discussed that sentiment at length. The song was a melancholy reflection on the feeling of being left behind after friends and family emigrate; a theme with generational significance for an Irish audience. As it happened, the track was set to release in December at the height of the pandemic, when thousands of families across the island, and across the world, would celebrate Christmas in isolation, without the usual traditional of far-flung loved ones returning home. Natasha and I felt that the sentiment of the song presented us with an utterly unique opportunity to try to visually evoke the feeling, the national sentiment, of that moment in time.

Cut to Natasha, myself, and a minimal crew braving locked-down Dublin, capturing abandoned, liminal spaces; the places between you and home. Bus depots, train stations, airports, all haunting in their emptiness. We contrasted this with a simple performance piece with the artist on a grand piano on a Heuston station platform, and the result was, I think, a suitable eulogy for time lost.