Background
His mother, Mia Carey, was a well known actress at the Gate Theatre, Dublin. The family moved back to Ireland in 1923 when his father took up a government post in the Department of Finance.
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His mother, Mia Carey, was a well known actress at the Gate Theatre, Dublin. The family moved back to Ireland in 1923 when his father took up a government post in the Department of Finance.
She starred in one of the first films of the newly set up Irish Film Society, Manon"s Acre, set in north Dublin. Carey became well known in the genre of short documentary films, with a lyrical gift for dramatic visualization of natural scenery: his two most well known films being Yeats Country (1965), exploring the relationship between the vision of poet West.B. Yeats and the landscape of Company Sligo, and Oisin (1970) a film which focuses entirely on the imagery created by the natural world, without either words or music
Of Errigal, Carey wrote "The mountains are the characters in the story, the drama is in the battle of the elements.
I have tried to convey the feeling of personality in a landscape, supported only by music and natural sounds". He went on to work for the Film Board of Canada.
Memorable is the lyrical realism of The Kid from Canada (1958) and the haunting textures of Arctic Outpost: Pagnirtung, North.W.T. (1960). Carey"s poetry is evident in the minimalist title of the wonderful Sky (1963), which he shot in Canada.
His last documentary short was Beara (1979), depicting the rich desolation of the barren West Cork peninsula.
Much of the dramatic cinematography in the film Ryan"s Daughter (1970), directed by David Lean, is due to Carey"s work on the film. In the early 1970s Patrick Carey returned to live in Canada. He died in 1996.