His powerful and moving stories vividly evoke the beauty of Cape Breton Island's rugged landscape and the resilient character of many of its inhabitants, the descendants of Scottish immigrants, who are haunted by ancestral memories and who struggle to reconcile the past and the present.

[2][3] Although he is known as a master of the short story, MacLeod's 1999 novel No Great Mischief was voted Atlantic Canada's greatest book of all time.

[6][7] In the introduction to a book of essays on his work, editor Irene Guilford concluded: "Alistair MacLeod's birthplace is Canadian, his emotional heartland is Cape Breton, his heritage Scottish, but his writing is of the world.

[10] However, the MacLeods suffered from homesickness and when Alistair was 10, they returned to Cape Breton and the farmhouse in Dunvegan, Inverness County, that his great-grandfather had built in the 1860s.

[14] He told a CBC Radio interviewer that as a student, he liked to read and write adding, "I was the kind of person who won the English prize in grade twelve.

[10] In 1956, MacLeod furthered his education by attending the Nova Scotia Teachers College in Truro and then taught school for a year on Port Hood Island off Cape Breton's west coast.

[14] At some point, he also worked at a logging camp on Vancouver Island rising rapidly through the ranks because he was physically able to climb the tallest trees and rig cables to their tops.

[17][18] A story published after his death in the student newspaper called him "a dedicated professor, an approachable colleague, and an inspiration to young, local writers."

It quoted Marty Gervais, one of his university colleagues, as saying that the door to MacLeod's cluttered office was always open to students, faculty and even members of the public.

He wrote that MacLeod read student work carefully and always began his critiques by pointing to the best things about a story before turning to its weaknesses.

"By the end," Cumyn wrote, "a story might seem in tatters, but in the oddly inspiring way that gifted teachers and editors have, issues and directions were made much clearer, and many of us felt more confident and enthusiastic about our work than we had going in.

When a student asked how long a good short story should be, "MacLeod clasped his hands and looked up toward the ceiling as if in prayer, then responded in a lyrical Cape Breton accent.

"One time correcting all my papers and putting circles around their and there and they're," he told a radio interviewer, "I began to think that maybe this wasn't the most worthwhile thing I should be doing with my life and so I said...I'm going to try to write like imaginatively or creatively for two hours a day."

In her review of Island, for example, Frances Itani calls the book of collected stories about miners, fishermen and Scottish Highlanders who came to Cape Breton "simply stunning."

He also found some of them overly melodramatic adding: "Several of MacLeod's stories have a quality of emotional genre-painting, and display a willingness to let the complexities of character die into stereotype.

"MacLeod is a distinguished writer, but his strengths are inseparable from his weaknesses: the sincerity that produces his sentimentality also stirs his work to a beautifully aroused plainness."

"[31] MacLeod's 1999 novel, No Great Mischief tells the story of the red-haired and dark-eyed MacDonald clan from 1779 when they left Scotland to settle in Cape Breton to more recent times.

Written in a hypnotic, stately prose where every word is perfectly placed, 'No Great Mischief' has the same haunting effect, and shows why the master craftsman took more than ten years to write it.

In The New York Times, for example, Thomas Mallon praised the book's lyricism and reported that "MacLeod's world of Cape Breton – with its Scottish fishermen and their displaced heirs, the miners and young professionals it has mournfully sent to the rest of the nation – has become a permanent part of my own inner library."

He ended, however, by noting that MacLeod's entire body of work would soon be published in the U.S. granting American readers "a new land that their imaginations can seize like a manifest destiny.

"[33] In the British newspaper, The Observer, Stephanie Merritt pointed out that when it was first published, No Great Mischief drew "unqualified praise" from the critics.

"[34] The Globe and Mail's critic Kenneth J. Harvey heaped praise on both the book and its author: "The book has it all: beauty, tragedy, grittiness, humour, darkness, love, music, raunchiness, poetry and a glut of fully drawn, extraordinary characters whose words and deeds and circumstances compel the reader to laugh and blush and weep and swell with bighearted pride...MacLeod is MacLeod, the greatest living Canadian writer and one of the most distinguished writers in the world.

Their master's and doctoral theses explore many aspects of his work including issues concerning regional and ethnic identity; the influence of island boundaries; magical thinking; and, the traditional roles of men and women.

MacLeod's work has been compared and, in some cases contrasted, with other Canadian authors such as David Adams Richards, Alden Nowlan, Wayne Johnston, Margaret Laurence, Hugh MacLennan and Ann-Marie MacDonald.

[29] Their oldest son Alexander MacLeod is also a writer, whose debut short story collection Light Lifting was a Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist in 2010.

Prominent writers such as Russell Banks, Colm Tóibín and David Adams Richards read from and comment on MacLeod's writing.

The film also features excerpts from composer Christopher Donison's opera Island based on one of MacLeod's short stories.