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Short Scottish Documentaries

14 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by thelostpenguin in documentaries, eiff, film festivals and threads

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cameo, documentaries, eiff, scottish

After many years of trying and failing to get to a screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival – the films I want to see are always sold out by the time I find out about them – and much juggling of the diary to find something that I wanted to see, was on at a time I wasn’t at work and wasn’t sold out, I finally made it to a screening. A screening of short, Scottish, documentaries which regular readers of this blog may identify as being pretty close to everything I want in a film screening. The screening was organised by the Scottish Documentary Institute. For those, like myself, who’d never heard of them before, they’re a research centre based at Edinburgh College of Art specialising in training, production and distribution of documentaries since their founding in 2004. The films screened were all the products of this year’s Bridging the Gap initiative – a new talent initiative where four Scottish-based filmmakers are commissioned to make a 10 minute documentary, receiving training and support along the way from development to post-production. In previous years all the films have been based around a theme, but this was the first year when the filmmakers hadn’t been given a theme, and yet they all seemed to have a theme despite that; of men in isolation.

Polaris (Chico Pereira)
Polaris is set amongst the Filipino community in Fraserburgh, and in particular on the trawler from which the film takes its name. The use of sound and equally of silence is brilliant, at times the sounds of the ship feel like a physical presence. It’s a contemplative and poetic piece with minimal dialogue, following the lives of the crew both on board and on shore without telling a particular ‘story’. Instead mediating on ideas of isolation and companionship, leaving the audience wanting to know more about the community into which we get the briefest of snapshots.

Pouters (Paul Fegan)
Pouters on the other hand is a film about the idiosyncratic and apparently ancient sport of Doo Fleein. Put aside your images of men in flat caps racing pigeons, this sport requires far more, cunning, dedication and sheer bloody minded trickery than its more refined cousin. This is a film about a 25 year rivalry, an all-consuming passion and a really obscure sport. The characters are charming and larger than life; the humour both broad and subtle. Not a lot happens in the film but there’s plenty of dramatic tension nonetheless, and maybe a wee bit of an insight into the West of Scotland sports fan mentality in there too.

In Search of the Wallaby (Alasdair Bayne/Andrew O’Connor)
In Search of the Wallaby is probably the weakest of the three films, mainly because, by the filmmakers own admission, the film is torn between what it wants to be. Back in 2004 a Wallaby was mysteriously found dead on Islay, how it got there in first place and what killed it was never resolved. The film starts as an X-files-style investigation into the mystery and runs into a dead end pretty quickly, and ends up as film about a young farmer with the Wallaby as a somewhat inadequate metaphor for his feelings about his life on the island. I couldn’t help feeling there was a far better film in there somewhere and it was a shame they hadn’t had the freedom to ditch the failed idea and more fully develop the more interesting one.

Takeaway (Yu-Hsueh Lin)
Takeaway is the most solitary of the films, quite an achievement given the company it found itself screened in. It follows a Chinese Takeaway delivery driver on his rounds one night and his musings on his job, his life in Scotland, the city and how much of a different world it becomes at night, takes us on a journey through an Edinburgh that is at once familiar and utterly alien. The cinematography of the world outside the fishbowl world of the car reflects this, the shooting creating a distorted world that is both intimidating and tempting.

Polaris and Pouters are available to watch online.

Film Festivals I Have Missed

21 Saturday Nov 2009

Posted by thelostpenguin in cca glasgow, film festivals and threads, gft

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africa in motion, birds eye view, eiff, films, gff

Film festivals are excellent things, brilliant opportunities to see films that you might not otherwise – or at least not for a long time – to see short films or obscure documentaries. I love film festivals, but crucially I don’t go to that many. Not, as some might presume, because there aren’t very many in Scotland, while the majority of the film festivals that take place in the UK are held in London there are a fair few up here. Recently the Edinburgh Film Festival has stepped out from under the shadow of its parent Festival, and the Glasgow and Shetland film festivals are gaining increasing international coverage; there are numerous smaller more specialised – Edinburgh’s annual Africa in Motion comes to mind – film festivals held in Glasgow and Edinburgh, festivals from the rest of the UK increasingly do tours and Tilda Swinton and co continue to produce charmingly eccentric efforts across the Highlands.  I just have this unfortunate tendency to miss them. Somehow, I’m always in the wrong place at the wrong time or don’t hear about them until it’s too late; one year I will hear that tickets for the Edinburgh film festival have gone on sale before the films I want to see sell out.

Never has this unfortunate tendency of mine been more obvious than this autumn. I knew in advance I would be missing the Africa in Motion festival as I was off adventuring around mainland Europe, and doubly so because its tour doesn’t come my way this year. However, it seemed everywhere I went around Europe I would find a film-festival that I couldn’t go to. Festivals seemed to be happening the week before I arrived places, or the week after I left them, in the case of the controversy dogged Zürich film festival it started the evening of the day I left. In one particularly annoying case I discovered that the last screening of one festival was the evening I arrived in that city; the day afterwards. It did occur to me that it would make quite a fun project to travel around Europe for a year trying to attend every single film festival, but mostly I came to feel that the film festivals of Europe were taunting me a little. It even continued once I’d returned to the UK, arriving in Bristol to discover that the Unchosen festival – which campaigns against Human Trafficking – was the following month. (Looking for a link to that festival I’ve discovered that I am currently missing the Encounters short film festival in Bristol…)

Therefore I felt thoroughly triumphant to actually make it to a screening as part of the Birds Eye View Festival when its tour arrived in Glasgow this week. Flooding and train cancellations meant I didn’t get to the Documentary Masterclass at the CCA but I did see an excellent silent film with live musical accompaniment at the GFT on Wednesday. My Best Girl starring the iconic Mary Pickford could almost be held up as the perfect archetypal romantic comedy, and despite not being the greatest fan of the genre I mean that as a compliment. Additionally it has a certain charm, a sort of innocence and naivety almost, borne of being made in a less cynical age than our own. I must admit that I think all silent movies should be watched on a big screen with live musical accompaniment, there’s a certain vibrancy that the live accompaniment gives them that doesn’t come across on the pre-recorded scores that accompany DVD or television screenings. Some films lend themselves to cinematic viewing, loosing a certain something on the small screen (I saw Requiem for a Dream in a tiny screening room, with an excellent sound system, at uni and I’ve never felt more claustrophobic or enjoyed that film more). There’s just something about that piano accompaniment, accentuating the moments of comedy or tenderness, or picking up the pace, galloping along as the inevitable chase gets increasingly manic, that somehow manages to hold its own against any amount of deafeningly crystal clear 5.1 surround sound. There’s something more intimate and warm about it, almost akin to attending a gig, knowing that you’re sharing a unique experience and that even if you were to go and see the film again, with the same people, in the same place with the same accompanist it wouldn’t be exactly the same. It was, as the girl in the row behind me announced at the end, “exactly what I needed.”

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