Forty-nine-year-old director, editor, screenwriter, cinematographer and producer Mark Jenkin creates a 17-minute mosaic of images that he collected on his trips across the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and the United States. The pictures are threaded together by a highly cryptic, confident and fast-paced voiceover by the director himself. His musings consist of random facts and references. This freeform movie, however, has at least one focal point: Celtic geography and civilisation.

The journey starts on a ferry on the way to Douglas, the capital of the Isle of Man, and then on to Peel, the British Crown Dependency’s old capital. The travels continue in Ireland, Cornwall, Britanny and California. What all of these places (except for the American state) have in common is their Celtic heritage. The destination choices are intimately linked to Jenkin’s film festival-hopping (the Dinard Festival of British cinema is one of identified stopovers). He captured all the images himself in the past two decades or so on his trusted analogue Super 8 camera.

He gingerly edited the film and added the sound with his own hands, as he did with his most famous features. The outcome are the instantly recognisable, grainy, homemade textures, and the poetic musings associated with the Cornish auteur. Image and sound are never synced, partly because Super 8 does not capture audio, but also due to the filmmaker’s belief that editing should come ahead of script-writing.

The story consists mostly of film quotes, references and commentary. His appreciation for retired Minx cyclist Mark Cavendish is also a central pillar, as is his love for sports comedy-drama Big Wednesday (John Milius, 1978). He is also a fan of Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds, and a critic of Hitchcock’s eponymous screen adaptation (1963). The former is set in Cornwall, while the latter was transposed onto Bodega Bay, in California (which might explain the director’s unexpected antipathy for the universally-acclaimed Hollywood classic).

This is a hyper-metatextual short movie aimed primarily at fans on Jenkin and cinephiles. It is charming and amusing to watch, yet not as mesmerising and hypnotic as Brexit drama Bait (2019) and folk horror Enys Men (2023). This is Jenkin’s first short film in five years, and a return to the medium for which the director became first known (he made 14 shorts between 2003 and 2020). It is also a testament to the filmmaker’s continued versatility,

I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash premiered in the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where this piece was originally written. Also showing at the BFI London Film Festival.