BBFF2026 Meet the Filmmaker: Vic Sarin
The Lightkeeper
“Anything which breathes must stop breathing one day. So we know that we are all here for short time. The film, I hope, will remind us what matters in life.” - Vic Sarin
Set on the remote coast of Donegal in the aftermath of the First World War and Irish Civil War, The Lightkeeper follows Seamus Óg MacGrianna, a lighthouse keeper whose carefully held world begins to unravel as he confronts grief, memory and the possibility of being seen again. Atmospheric and deeply human, the film reflects Vic Sarin’s fascination with the connections that sustain us - and asks what truly matters in the short time we have.
A lighthouse keeper has one job: to help others find their way.
For Vic Sarin, that simple idea became something much more personal.
While developing The Lightkeeper, Vic met a lighthouse keeper whose job was to guide ships safely through the darkness. But the more he learned about him, the more Vic became interested in a different question: what happens when the person responsible for guiding everyone else has lost their own way?
It is an idea that sits at the heart of The Lightkeeper, but the film began much earlier, with an image Vic has carried with him for years.
He told us that he once watched a short film about a baboon mother who had given birth to a stillborn baby. Despite the baby being gone, she continued to carry it with her for days, moving through the world as though it might somehow come back to life.
For Vic, there was something special in that instinct.
“The closest relationship in life is of parents and children,” he says. “I wanted to celebrate that profound connection which we often forget.”
That unconditional love became the emotional centre of The Lightkeeper, not as sentimentality, but as something fundamental to how we survive.
Set against the remote coast of Donegal, the film gave Vic a landscape through which to consider grief, memory and the ways people try to keep living when something has been lost.
But rather than approaching those ideas as something to be neatly explained, Vic was drawn to the possibility of letting the images carry them.
“At a very young age I was drawn to the images,” Vic says. “We speak in so many languages but we see only in one. The power of cinema.”
It is a belief that comes through in the way he talks about filmmaking. For Vic, cinema does not necessarily need to tell us what to think; sometimes its power lies in what remains after an image has disappeared.
That may be why Ireland had such a strong pull.
“As an outsider I found something magical about the land, its people. They have what we call in film sense the IT.”
There is something almost instinctive in the way Vic describes that connection. The landscape of Donegal gave The Lightkeeper its physical world, but it also offered something harder to manufacture: atmosphere.
Finding the right lighthouse became one of the production's biggest challenges. Filming at sea brought another. The tides, Vic recalls, were an obstacle in themselves.
Yet when asked who he could not have made the film without, his answer is not a particular piece of equipment or technical collaborator.
“The folks of Donegal.”
It is a fitting answer for a film concerned with connection. For all its isolation, The Lightkeeper was made through people. Through the communities and places that allowed Vic to bring an imagined world into something tangible.
And then there is Australia.
Vic lived here for just six years, from 15 to 21. But those years became foundational to the filmmaker he would eventually become. It was in Australia that he fell in love with movies, discovering the cinema that would shape his life and career.
So bringing The Lightkeeper to the Byron Bay International Film Festival's 20th edition carries a significance that goes well beyond geography.
“I only spent six years in Australia but those years shaped my entire life. For me it is a kind of spiritual connection with the land, its people of Australia.”
After premiering at the 2026 Dublin International Film Festival, The Lightkeeper now arrives at BBFF. A festival Vic feels is the right place for the film to take its next step.
And perhaps that is because, beneath the lighthouse and the Irish landscape, Vic is ultimately interested in something much bigger than the setting itself.
Our time here is short. So what matters?
“Anything which breathes must stop breathing one day,” Vic says. “So we know that we are all here for short time. The film, I hope, will remind us what matters in life.”
For a filmmaker who first fell in love with cinema through the power of an image, it is a remarkably simple ambition.
To make something that stays with you.
Long after the lights come back on.
The NSW Premiere of THE LIGHTKEEPER is at Palace Byron Bay on Tuesday 24th October.