The year is 2000 and Jonas is 25, a fatherless youth (playedby Mick Ford) drifting about Dublin and the countryside. He encounters,not entirely by accident, an eccentric old garage owner named Yoshka(Trevor Howard), who exists in a world of ancient car carcasses andrusty solitude. Yoshka has a secret, which Jonas is challenged to learn.Theirs is the stormy and sometimes brutal partnership of master andapprentice, and finally of guru and follower. Tanner's firstEnglish-language film polarized his international audience; some felt hehad abandoned the political acuity of his earlier films for a journeyinto the occult. There is no denying the spiritual content of LightYears Away, but even in his choice of a profoundly austere Irishlandscape, Tanner eschews hazy mysticism. The film is a fable abouttranscendence, and about a search for knowledge.