John McBride Neill was a noted cinema architect in the cinema building boom in Northern Ireland in the 1930s. His cinemas were 1,000-seater monuments to the golden era of the silver screen. He was also a builder of model airplanes, a musician and repairer of organs, unmarried and, when the work dried up, a
cantankerous recluse for over twenty years. He was John T. Davis’s Uncle Jack.
He gave him his first camera and, when he died, he left John T. his house. ‘The Uncle Jack’ is John T. Davis’s attempt to come to terms with the unfinished business of their relationship, but it also about coming to terms with himself.
(1996, 80mins)