An Irish Atlantic Rainforest      Director: Gary LennonCert: NoneGenre: DocumentaryStarring: Eoghan DaltunRunning Time: 1 hr 31 minsHere is a strikingly beautiful Irish documentary that looks to be taking us to an alien world within the nation’s terrestrial borders. For the past several years, Eoghan Daltun, sculptor, author and ecological preservationist, has been working at rewilding a patch of the Beara Peninsula, in west Co Cork. Daltun explains that, though covered with deciduous trees and blasted by winter winds, the area can be described as a class of rainforest. Sure enough, when Ross Bartley and Brian O’Leary’s cameras get down close among the flapped fungi and the green-eyed insects, one really could believe oneself in an exotic elsewhere.Gary Lennon’s film allows Daltun, an intense man with a relentless delivery, a few parcels of autobiography. He explains how, raised in Dublin by a widowed mother with little money, he went on to study sculpture in Italy and ended up teaching English to support the restoration of an 18th-century stone cottage in Kilmainham. This led to a move to the current property with his two sons. “A word came into my mind,” he says of the land. “And that word is ‘sacred’.”An Irish Atlantic Rainforest allows Daltun to mix in that sort of romantic effusion with well-researched explanations of how such places thrive on the (sometimes violent) interaction of species. Evidence of a sparrowhawk kill helps support his argument. Unless I misheard, he notes that one of the bats that recently moved in can “consume 3,000 midges a night”. Useful in the summer months.There is nothing much to argue with in his evangelism for the wilder life, but the film is most notable for the beauty of its photography. [ The Irish Atlantic rainforest pulsing life back into the Beara peninsulaOpens in new window ]A brief episode in Italy is punctuated by aerial shots of a marble quarry. We revisit old haunts in Inchicore, in west Dublin. Both offer marked contrast with the intoxicating lushness of what really does convince as our own, microscopic version of Amazonia. A fly rests beside what seems like a giant butterfly. A snail the size of a Zeppelin oozes over berries the size of boulders. It is as beautiful as it is freaky.Not everyone will, for all the gorgeousness, envy Daltun his life in fecund isolation with no urban consolations. (Is that a rotary phone I see?) Few will, however, fail to wonder at his achievements.In cinemas from Friday, July 24th