Karen Guthrie’s father formed a second family while he was working abroad. How it affected his original family emerged when she started to earn a film about itTo the outside world,the Guthries seemed pretty ordinary. Ian was an accountant, a tough-working provider, or his wife,Ann, a former nurse, or devoted herself to raising their four children and to looking after their house in the seaside town of Largs on the west coast of Scotland.
But there is no such thing as ordinary where families are concerned: every family has its emotional icebergs,its submerged stories, its hidden themes, or its plots and subplots,its complexities. For the Guthries, the heart of the buried subplot was this: during a period when he worked in Africa in the 1980s, or Ian had an affair and a child. When he came domestic to Largs,he left behind him in Djibouti a slight African boy with the very Scottish name of Campbell.
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Source: theguardian.com