LIFE OF BYRON
All those women, all these years later and it comes back to Mum.Why does she want me? After everything? Maybe she’s still got something to teach me?
When divorced, fifty-something Byron is summoned back from Greece to make some crucial decisions about his elderly Mother, he doesn’t count on the reckoning he’s about to face.
His Mother is suffering the early effects of dementia, and his younger sister, Alex is burnt-out and angry, having cared for her alone for the past five years. Alex thinks the best option is to sell the house and put their Mum in a nursing home, and at first, it seems that Byron is convinced.
As we see Byron pick through his old glory box, we witness some of the crucial moments in his life, freewheeling on a journey from his first day of school, as a six-year-old boy in his Tsolia suit, to his days as a teenager tooling out ACDC on his guitar, desperate to be free of his Greek heritage, to his arrival in Greece for the first time, discovering the ‘home I’d never been to’.
Immersing himself in his memories, Byron re-discovers, love, pain, sex, kids, divorce, cocaine and yoga (not necessarily in that order) and the women that shaped him; his first girlfriend, his mesmerising cousin Athena and his straight-talking wife, and love of his life, Thamais.
Byron realises that these women have shown him more of himself than he could possibly discover on his own, yet there’s one who is the lynchpin holding everything together -
His Mum; the one who gave him the gift of life and the one who made the ultimate sacrifice to let him go.
As Byron spirals through the past, he starts to wonder; can he really send his Mother away after she’s given up so much for he and Alex? And if the only alternative is that he care for her himself – is he good enough? Maybe it’s time for him to finally grow up and find out.