THIS IS MY FATHER

When present-day schoolteacher Kieran Johnson discovers a photo of a person who might have been his father, the questions begin. His mother has suffered a stroke and cannot communicate what the brooding man needs so desperately to know: who he really is. The answers can only be found in his ancestral Ireland. Taking along his nephew, Kieran searches for his roots in the Auld Sod. Amidst the “traveling people,” the Celtic version of gypsies, the visitors locate an old tarot-reading woman, a living witness who can remember back to the events of 1939 and the taboo romance between a poor farmer and a widow's daughter. Kieran finds that class distinction and religious intolerance raged against true love, and the bitter clash launched the Johnson line to the beckoning golden light of the United States. they say everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day, and that's more or less so. But during THIS IS MY FATHER, let yourself be a Johnson, for everyone has forerunners, parents whose hidden pasts created a particular here-and-now for each of us. As a sweeping romantic drama and a time-spanning journey into self, THIS IS MY FATHER stakes its ancestral claim.