Duthchas is a beautiful film about life on the island of Berneray, combining a family archive of film shot in the 1960s with interviews with residents and their descendants. The title Duthchas is a word roughly translated here into Home, but has no direct translation in English, encompassing a wealth of ideas, including heritage, lineage, culture, and relationship with the world and each other.

My first thought when watching this film was about how different life is. Even when comparing the apples and oranges of the past and the present, I couldn’t help feeling that, despite being Scottish, my life has more in common with an English-speaking city dweller in another country than it has with a Gaelic-speaking Hebridean. Gloria, an Australian nurse who was the first non-Gaelic speaker to settle on the island, and whose wedding is captured on film, describes Berneray as so “foreign”, and I understood what she meant.

Language is a huge part of it, and you can trace the generational shifts in the loss of it. The older generation, who you can see as young men and women in the film, are native Gaelic speakers, and during their adolescence Gaelic was the only language spoken on the island. English was reserved for use on the mainland, and women who went rarely outside the islands would maybe not speak it at all. Language is such a cornerstone of culture, conveying a worldview, values, and intrinsic ideas. It is not simply different sounds for like-for-like subjects, it is a transmission of whole communal understanding of the world and ourselves.

In the 1960s, life on Berneray was one of tight knit community, with daily interaction and reliance on one another, for crofting, for fishing, for trading. In the evening was ceilidhing, going to the neighbours’ house for drinking and dancing. Churchgoing on the Sunday was an unspoken must, as was the rule that you never put your washing out on the Sabbath. People lived in the houses their grandfathers and great-grandfathers built. They could trace their lineage back through their patronymic, pass down tales and songs that existed for hundreds of years.

The interruption in that way of life was when time for secondary school came, and children were sent off the island to residential schools taught entirely in English. And if you couldn’t speak English, you were given the belt until you could. It was a brutal dislocation, and it beat Gaelic out an entire generation. Women especially, were not expected to return to the island, as all paying work there was seen as ‘for men’. Mothers are the best resource you can have for handing down knowledge and culture, and without a place for them on the island, young women married on the mainland or emigrated abroad, taking the next generation of family with them.

Television also ended the nightly ceilidhs, and made the intergenerational social cohesion decline. People became isolated in their own homes, creating gaps among the older Gaelic-speaking populace and the younger English-speaking families. Ceilidhs were not simply about dancing, but where language, music, song, history and story were handed down. Younger people just weren’t exposed to this.

But while this is a reminiscence, it isn’t a eulogy. A new generation is coming up, who have had the opportunity of being educated in Gaelic medium schools, and who have Gaelic and are keen to keep it. It may not be the Gaelic of their forefathers, but its very survival leaves open the door for all that to be preserved and rediscovered. The causeway has meant greater ease of travel and better economic prospects. And technology has meant that working on the mainland isn’t the absolute necessity it once was.

Duthchas charts the change and continuity of a way of life, of a home that has been kept by its people even when separated from it. Really beautiful film.