From the maker of Nanook of the North, about people living on a big rock island off the coast of Ireland. They have no soil. They go out on a small boat to catch an enormous, weird-looking (and harmless) basking shark.
It made me nervous watching the Man of Aran's tween son messing around and sitting on the edge of a cliff. He's out there alone and decides to climb down the cliff which seems unwise. But I'm sure the kid survived making the movie. He was cute in his sweater, baggy pants and tam.
The people on the island take little advantage of living in the 20th century.
Come to think of it, the filmmakers were the same way, making essentially a silent movie in 1934. It had music and some unsyncronized sound.
You should be happy to know that, like Nanook of the North, the movie was "docufiction" or "ethnofiction", much of it phony. The people there didn't hunt for sharks. They had to bring people in to show them how to use a harpoon. The locals risked their lives in a small boat in bad weather even though none of them knew how to swim, something they only did for the camera. No one in the "family" presented in the movie were related. The director picked them for looks from among the locals. He said himself that they were barely paid. It was true that locals would gather seaweed, but they didn't do it when they were in danger of being swept out to sea.
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