Edinburgh International Film Festival: Made in London
After earlier reporting on the claims by the BBC’s film critic Siobhan Synnot that the Edinburgh Film Festival is “created in London and shipped up to Edinburgh for ten days” and that “90% of the people who select the films live outside Scotland and are London-based” [Edinburgh Film Festival ‘created in London’ ] – a description that wasn’t denied or refuted by the EIFF – more has emerged about the film festival’s funding.
Some background is useful, this from Screen Scotland A Film Festival for Edinburgh: Update | Screen Scotland (from 2022):
“Since the closure of the Centre for the Moving Image (CMI), incorporating the Edinburgh Filmhouse, the Belmont Filmhouse in Aberdeen and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Screen Scotland has been in discussions with the Administrators and other partners to explore options for cultural cinema programme activity in both Edinburgh and Aberdeen, as well as the possibility of a 2023 edition of Edinburgh’s film festival.
These discussions are ongoing and we can now provide an update on progress as regards Edinburgh’s film festival.
Screen Scotland has purchased the Edinburgh International Film Festival’s IP (intellectual property) from CMI’s administrators, FRP Advisory, including domain name and brand assets, to be provided as appropriate to a future operator of the festival.
An options appraisal is also underway for a film festival in Edinburgh in 2023. This appraisal is being led by Kristy Matheson, who was Creative Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2022, alongside colleagues. They will be supported by the Edinburgh International Festival, who have also provided the team with office space at the Hub, in Edinburgh.
The work will be funded with an award of up to £97,647 from Creative Scotland. This funding is drawn from the 2022/23 Regular Funding Awards originally allocated to the CMI.”
In addition, the Scottish Government’s Festivals Expo Fund gave EIFF £60k in 2024, the Platforms for Creative Excellence (PlaCE) fund gave them £75k in 2023 and under multi-year funding, this year Creative Scotland awarded them £1,950,000. That’s over £2million of Scottish public funds going towards a festival with seemingly no oversight, due diligence or expectation of a return for the Scottish people. This is not a way to create a thriving cultural sector.
The Scottish Government were approached for comment. A spokesperson simply said:
“Festivals such as EIFF contribute to the economic, social and cultural life of Scotland’s capital city and are important in affirming Scotland’s reputation as a global centre for artistic excellence. The Expo fund is managed at arm’s length from the Scottish Government.”
This response doesn’t deal with any of the allegations made by Synnot or any of the issues at play.
It’s also noted that none of Siobhan Synnot’s allegations were disputed by EIFF’s Director Paul Ridd. Her criticisms deserve a more serious response, and Scotland deserves more credible cultural institutions.
How can it be possible to invest over £2m in public funding for an organisation and then have no expectations of cultural or economic return? How can it be possible that Creative Scotland funds an organisation to this scale that employs virtually no one from Scotland? How is that even possible? It feels very much like the Edinburgh Film Festival is a festival that just happens to take place in Scotland but has little to do with it. But, if that is the case it should be funded from elsewhere.
Three final points. This is not a ‘nativist’ nor a ‘nationalist’ issue. The people that should be employed on this festival could be from anywhere, but based here. The point is we should be building the ecosystem, the infrastructure of a Scottish film industry and culture. We are not. Secondly, it is not ‘nationalist’ to say that public funding from Scotland – that you and I pay for – should have some tangible benefit to the Scottish economy and to the Scottish cultural scene. This is a low bar. Third, there is not a dichotomy between being ‘international’ and ‘Scottish’. There just isn’t. Other film festivals manage it fine.
The level of complacency and negligence at play here is astonishing.
There’s another aspect to this in that no arts journalist – or journal (we approached the key ones – would touch this story), so we’re publishing it. I suspect the response will be nothing, a shrug of the shoulders, a quiet complacency, a culture of low expectation, and quiet decline.
I don’t decry the EIFF funding, I think it should be funded to the hilt. I’d like to see it thrive. Aspects of the festival look great. But serious questions need to be asked about how we manage funding and how we cohere a cultural strategy that seem absent from this picture.
Hmmm, thanks for that revealing blast, Mike. I just read through the whole EIFF 2025 programme and was not impressed. What a crying shame.
For £2 mill the programme is distinctly underwhelming.
Exactly, Mark, 2 million is less than the (distinctly trashy) Malaga Film Festival (3 million euros) and a quarter of San Sebastian, about 9 million.
Last time I checked, Cannes had a budget of over 35 million euros, it’s surely higher by now…
Can’t see how it can be done properly with 2 million quid… as always, we are the country in Europe which spends least on film festivals without any question…
I wish the EIFF had just been allowed to die and we could have invented a brand new festival outside the Central Belt… something quirky and not at all pompous, free from the trappings of the British film industry, in an out of the way place, where a whole cinema complex could have been built, maybe, say Bute, where there is a cinema in Rothesay and a train line to Glasgow…
Something NEW….
Oh there are many things like this – annual (cultural) events that happen more out of habit than inspiration that got stale years ago and by rights should simply end. Too many vested interests for that to happen though. Even making them biennial is out of the question. Think how a Fringe every two or even three years only might help many things? Never gonna happen.
The point of an alternative film festival in Scotland from my point of view would be to try to establish an autonomous, low budget, Scottish film industry on a completely different set of coordinates to the prevailing ones, inviting film-makers and films of that kind from around the world…
I can’t express how angry, in fact furious I am with the pathetic, utterly pathetic Scottish government and their minions at C.S / SS. I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the entire SNP over their negligence and lack of initiative on Scottish culture… I truly hate those people…
There has been a revolution in film-making with the advent of digital, going back 25 years, and yet there are even fewer Scottish feature films being shot than there were under Margaret Thatcher, when there were about five per year…
And nobody says anything? People just shrug…? What the fck is wrong with people who work in Scottish culture?
Absolutely unfckn believable…
Exactly, Mark, 2 million is less than the (distinctly trashy) Malaga Film Festival (3 million euros) and a quarter of San Sebastian, about 9 million.
Last time I checked, Cannes had a budget of over 35 million euros, it’s surely higher by now…
Can’t see how it can be done properly with 2 million quid… as always, we are the country in Europe which spends least on film festivals without any question…
I wish the EIFF had just been allowed to die and we could have invented a brand new festival outside the Central Belt… something quirky and not at all pompous, free from the trappings of the British film industry, in an out of the way place, where a whole cinema complex could have been built, maybe, say Bute, where there is a cinema in Rothesay and a train line to Glasgow…
Something NEW with no baggage from the past and a sense of fun about it….
To be fair, I really see no reason to doubt there will be oversight / due dilligence and indeed professionalism from the team running the festival. That’s not the issue. A MacDonald is, after all, one of the leading independent producers in the UK today, responsible for such vaccuous exercises of idelogical neutrality / extreme centre positioning as CIVIL WAR, by Alex Garland.
There is nothing surprising about all this. One of the leading figures of Scottish culture and the independence movement of the last 50 years told me about 10 years ago when I bumped into him on the Glasgow-Edinburgh train that the SNP had no culture policy when they came to power. Literally.
They still have no culture policy today. They are happy to let the market decide for the most part.
If the market dictates GROW, an American film directed by a Scot, John McPhail, about giant pumpkins, so be it. It was shot in Scotland and so classifies as Scottish and will screen at the festival, I think the only Scottish film to do so (though maybe there’s another one).
Let it be said that merely allocating funds to films which shoot in Scotland is the lowest common denominator for a film screen agency. It is something Scottish Enterprise could do.
Screen Scotland effectively act like a mini studio, wheeling and dealing in the IP market, investing in films which they think might make money or enticing film shoots to Scotland, films which, culturally speaking, bear little or no relationship to Scotland at all.
There is little or no cultural remit so to speak, and no onus on discovering and nurturing Scottish voices. That is the least of it, It’s all about the market.
The new EIFF is more of the same. A bland, predominantly anglo-american llne-up…
But lets face it, after 17 years of SNP govt, we deserve everything we get…
The root of the problem was identified by Colin McArthur in his essay ‘Artists and Philistines: The Irish and Scottish Film Milieux’, first published in Journal for the Study of British Cultures 5, No. 2 (1998) and recently republished in the collection ‘Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays’ edited by Jonathan Murray (2024). McArthur points out that the neoliberal, commercial, American-oriented model under which Scottish film funding operates was established by Michael Forsyth in 1997, shortly before the restoration of Scotland’s Parliament. Scottish Screen and its successors Creative Scotland/Screen Scotland have continued on their own merry way ever since. They display complete indifference to and ignorance of culture. No Scottish Culture Secretary has had the nous or gumption to change things.
https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2024/06/cinema-culture-scotland-selected-essays-by-colin-mcarthur/
Thanks, Graeme it’s clear to me that they’re Tatran Tories, at least half the SNP are Tartan Tories and always were, Angus Robertson for sure, the chief beneficiaries of the Vernacular Turn of the 80s and 90s have been these Tartan Tories in our midst who don’t care a damn about film and whose vision of culture is totally at odds with the European model where access to films and the national representation on film are a fundamental democratic right…
Bizarelly enough, it was elements in the Franco regime in 1960s Spain, as the ailing bankrupt dictatorship started to open to the world via tourism, who one day realized that to be perceived as a modern, appealing country, Spain needed a film industry, and so started a film fund which led to directors like Carlos Saura and Luis Garcia Berlanga breaking through and a new tolerance for the once proscribed Luis Buñuel in exile in Mexico, albeit censorship never ended until Franco was dead and buried (and even continued somewhat after) …
Franco’s fascists, and a curious cinephile Falangist called Garcia Escudero in particular, set the foundations of the modern film subsidy sytem in Spain but at least they had the wit to realize that their national image abroad was to a large extent dependent on film and the prestige it can bring.
This still hasn’t been understood by the Tartan Tory SNP regime…
I’m afraid that most of the SNP’s leaders are culturally ignorant and wedded to neoliberal ideology, and I agree that there is no chance of Angus Robertson doing anything to improve things. Nothing will improve unless or until we have a Culture Secretary prepared to take the radical step of putting culture at the centre of Culture Policy.
Exactly, Graeme, it’s pumpkins and turnips for the forseeable future…
They let Lynne Ramsay go, possibly the best film director to emerge in the UK since Terrence Davies. She has only made one Scottish feature…
After “Ratcatcher” she should have been offered carte blanch to make three films in Scotland within a certain budget, but they just let her go….
You could build a whole film industry and national culture around Ramsay’s talent.
What a loss for Scotland…
You might have supposed that the SNP would have made an effort to take stock of the last 40 years of Scottish culture – which clearly show trends which are, shall we say, vernacular – and learn the lessons…
The Scottish writers who gathered around the figure of Phillip Hobsbaum in Glasgow in the second half of the 80s, Kelman, Gray and others who followed like Janice Galloway, Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh, changed the cultural mood by eschewing the international novel and writing of the local in the vernacular… it was a kind of revolution…
In painting, artists like Ken Curry and Strphen Campbell put Scotland on the map internationally…
The Proclaimers shot to stardom by singing in broad Scots, part of their appeal lay in that…
In film, Peter Mullan and Lynne Ramsay, Laverty and Loach’s Scottish films…
The effect of all os this was to change the way the Scots think about themselves, creating the conditions for an independence referendum…
I think there is 8 million for film production at Scottish Screen. At least half of that should be spent on vernacular Scottish film making…
Without “The Bus Conducter Hines”, “Trainspotting”, “Laidlaw” “Morvan Caller” “Sweet Sixteen” and of course Braveheart”, probably there would not have been an independence referendum…
As Angus Calder put it, “there is no culture without place” and we really need a film industry built on that idea, which is to say, the main job of Screen Scotland should be to make local, low budget films in the vernacular and break away from this fanciful idea they can be player on the internstional film scene. That’s not their fckn job….
When, if ever, will the SNP get it and fomulate policy accordingly….???
Sorry to go on, but the situation of Scottish film, and the lack of representation of Scotland on film, can only be captured by the word scandalous…
We are talking about a country which hasn’t seen a single feature film shot in its third and fourth cities, Aberdeen and Dundee, and needs to call on two English directors like Danny Boyle and Stephen Frears, to shoot Edinburgh memorably… to film Orkney, a German director was apparently required.. and for Fife, another Englishman, Alan Rickman…
We are talking about a country which hasn’t shot anything at all about the great cultural flowering from 1985-2000 (roughly, and which would have to include the pathfinder, Bill Forsyth), a country where a common knowledge of that flowering is hazy at best, when not altogether absent…
A country with nothing to say on film the issue of independence or the Anshcluss with England of 1707, or the Reformation, or the Enlightenment, or Robert Burns, the forerunner of Romanticism, or the Scots role in the Empire, or the Scottish Colourists, or the Glasgow Boys, or the madness of religious sectarianism, or even the invention of photography by Hill and Adamson, a treat for a film-maker you might think, or the novels of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson or Muriel Spark… Not to mention more scabrous issues like the Highland Clearances or the massacre of Culloden Moor which, again, an Englishman had to film for us (Peter Watkins)…
There is money for Frears’ THE LOST KING, the search for the Richard III, the last Plantangent King and a direct descendant of Edward I, “the hammer of the Scots”, but no Scottish film-maker has shot the story of any of Scotland’s monarchs, and no English funder would provide a pennty for such a film, not the BBC, not the BFI, absolutely no chance of that…
It’s just not “British” to shoot something unashamedly Scottish….
Meanwhile, which Scottish screenplay writer would even think about tackling one of those big themes? The films being backed by Screen Scotland have so little to do with Scotland, there is a reasonable case for shuttering Screen Scotland and folding it into the BFI… I seriously don’t believe the BFI would treat Scottish film-makers more unfairly than Screen Scotland have been doing…
Sorry, correction, they did actually shoot Stevenson recently. Unfortunately, they chose the most hackneyed and most frequently adaoted story of his, “Jeckyll and Hyde”, which has been filmed probably twenty or thirty times, so much so that it has become a cliche, and according to Borges (a massive RLS fan), not faithfully to the book even once… With the best will in the world, it’s hard to see what could have been gained there, an obvious non-starter I would have said…
Stevenson must be one of the authors most adapted to film and TV in world letters, but even still, some of his stuff could still be done and seem fresh. I’m thinking of “Ebb Tide” for example, about the three beach bums in Hawai who get offered the chance of a free passage back home if they agree to take the risk of sailing a plague ridden ship and its cargo of champagne which no other sailor wants to touch, and end up stealing it, only to find out the bottles of champagne are in fact filled with water, losing their bearings in so many horse latitudes and end up at the mercy of one of the first great demonic characters of modern world literature, Attwater, the forerunner of Kurtz himself, alone on his island with its natives over whom he rules like a king…
There is a film from the 1930s, but it is a fantastic story and has hardly been done on film or TV…
Just saying, like, eh?
I agree with that last bit about local and low budget but perhaps sometimes vernacular rather than always. I am a firm believer that the local can just as easily be universal as that which sets out to be, if done well and from the heart.
Looking at your other comments what struck me is that theatre has done more of what you suggest – there was a long cycle of plays not very long ago about early kings in Scotland though I forget the detail. I know the Festivals get a slagging, but there is more truly Scottish content there (historical and contemporary), but it does all seem to be in theatre, apart from the odd comedian.
Hi Niemand, thanks for your reply.
Films about monarchy, whether Scottish or English, would certainly not be top of my list of things to do, I best clear that up.
It’s just that it struck me watching THE LOST KING (S Frears) the other night, which is an okay film, and well shot as always by Frears, that there is no way on earth it would have been made if it were the other way around, that is, if a Scottish woman in London had suddenly got a hunch about where one of the Stuart kings had lain buried for centuries, (rather than an English woman in Edinburgh about Richard III), and gone up to Scotland to unearth him/her on a whim… There is no way the BFI or the BBC or any of the English funders would have backed that film, you know?
But things are so bad for Scottish stories that I doubt Screen Scotland would have backed it either…
The remarkable thing about all of this is the SNP are meant to be a nationalist party, they’re meant to be interested in Scottish culture and maybe even be a wee bit chauvinist about it, like the Catalans are, who insisted on shooting the XIV century Catalan language classic TIRANT LE BLANC (Vicente Aranda) for 11 million dollars twenty years ago… that kind of thing…
You might have expected at least one more or less openly nationalist production company to have emerged, favoured by the SNP regime, that is certainly the case in Catalonia when the nationalists have been in power… instead, the situation is even worse than under New Labour…
More worryingly still are other absences, for example, how come no director has claimed Glasgow so to speak? Think of Woody Allen and New York or Pedro Almodovar and Madrid or Fellini and Rome…you would have hoped a Scottish director would have said, “I’m going to spend the next ten years of my career making films set in Glasgow, I’m going to make it mine”, but that hasn’t happened, and I put it down to a lack of vision by the powers that be… they scare off indigenous Scottish talent…
Or, on a different theme, with our national penchant for education, and the huge success of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, how come no one has shot a film about a school teacher since then? The French of course have done so, Betrand Tavernier shot “It All Starts Today” back in 1999, and the recently deceased Laurent Cantet with “The Class” about 15 years ago for which he won the Palme D’Or…
Anyway, I hope and expect Angus Robertson and Nicola Sturgeon and Fiona Hyslop attend the premiere of the film about giant pumpkins, or turnips or whatever it is – GROW – and sit there basking in the glory of that “Scottish production”…
It’s embarrassing, frankly…
Our Ladies (2021) directed by Michael Caton-Jones (born in Broxburn) based on The Sopranos by Alan Warner (Oban) and filmed in Fort William, Edinburgh and Glasgow might be seen as the natural successor to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Thanks, Mark, I haven’t seen it I’m afraid.
I am pretty sure there must be Scottish writers out there who more or less have just given up on Screen Scotland, I don’t know how many, but a good few. I am / was one of them, though it was a long time ago now, but I would still be very reluctant to go back to them to be honest, not because the project didn’t happen, ir probably didn’t deserve to happen, but because they were totally clueless about film and they still are…
You can tell, that 350 K they put into “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” is the confirmation. They could have just burnt that money, you know, gone to George Square with a big sack full of cash and set it on fire, for what it’s worth…
You need a realistic model for film-making in Scotland, and that model is found mainly in world cinema, where films are made with tiny budgets, and not in the American cinema, where one TV episode – not even film – will cost more than the entire annual Screen Scotland production budget.
So, don’t watch Netflix, folks, stop watching American films and spend a year watching world cinema which is much easier now with platforms like MUBI. We need more good writers, there is a dearth of good writing just now, but there are loads of films out there which can serve as a model or inspiration…
Another one that comes to me is SEGUNDO PREMIO by Isaki Lacuesta, a big award winner last year in Spain, which is fictionalised account of the Spanish group Los Planetas and the recording of their legendary album “Una Semana En El Motor De Un Autobus” which is one of the most famous LPs of all time in Spain… It’s a decent film…
And I’m watching it thinking, “well, all those legendary bands in Glasgow like Primal Scream and no one has shot anything about them, let alone a feature film”…
How can that be? And my conclusion is that the people at Screen Scotland are not doing their job, and they are not doing it because the coordinates the whole entitiy is run on are the wrong coordinates for a small or medium sized country with not much money for film…
Did you see Big Gold Dream Douglas?
The James Trilogy
Hi Bella, aye, I saw it, I thought it was really good, Gran McPhee deserves enormous credit for making it with almost no money. I really admire him for just ploughing ahead.
The “executive team” of SS includes a lawyer. Why do we need a lawyer in such a prominent role in a film agency with 8 million quid, not even half the amount a couuntry like Scotland needs?
It’s corporate Scotland, the people who actually the run the arts in Scotland are the lawyers and accountants. You can easily imagine these people thinking the world really needs another “Jekyll and Hyde”…
Will it never change? Will there never be a well financed, autonomous film and tv industry in Scotland?
Is it maybe just beyond us, like qualifying for the world cup has become?
In any case, Bella, SEGUNDO PREMIO is a feature film, not a documentary probably costing around 2 million euros about the recording of an album and all the crazy things happening with the band during that time. Bizarrley enough, the original basist of Los Planetas, a band from Granada, was Scottish, though that isn’t mentioned in the film!!!
@Douglas, apparently Monty Python’s lawyers were instrumental in steering Life of Brian past the censors, by arguing it was a spoof not of Christianity, but of biblical epics.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jul/24/turn-the-parody-up-to-11-the-best-spoof-movies-ranked
There’s an article for Bella to commission: Landmark Legal Opinion in Cinema: These Lawyers Brought Us Great Movies Such As… !
Anyway, how else do official secrets, sordid scandals and perilous policies see the light of day without someone willing to go to jail?
This notion that national reputation can openly be managed for public good (and less openly, but equally obviously, milked for private benefit) goes somewhat to the heart of my critique of this approach to creative industries. These people are professional liars subcontracting others like them, as if impervious to detraction and immune from objective tests for things like corruption, nepotism, abuses and so forth. But if scandals exist merely to be managed…
I take it that Seth Rogen’s The Studio is more factual documentary than parody without hitting so hard it rocks the boat.
I suppose this returns to (possibly unproductive and distracting) theories about masters’ tools. Even if there was a rival Unfunded Film Festival, it shouldn’t escape the same scrutiny. I do think it is amusing in context that Scotland perhaps had a reputation (in the same doubtful International sense) for philosophy (or a tiny number of named individuals associated with that discipline anyway). Where sits that now?
Does Scotland have a ‘reputation as a global centre for artistic excellence’ that can be ‘affirmed’? Maybe it did once.
As for the whole concept of ‘artistic excellence’, what actually is that? I will tell you, it is civil servants’ jargon that you will see anywhere that arts’ funding is mentioned. It can never be defined and means virtually nothing. Take out the word ‘arts’ and you then have ‘excellence’, similarly used across corporate culture and elsewhere to mean precisely sweet FA. My friend at work once turned it into a noun in a spoof management newsletter saying ‘we must produce excellents’ which summed up its vacuousness.
Just like most public and private sector corporate drones, the SG response is so utterly meaningless it is insulting.
I read the Robin McAlpine latest on everyday corruption yesterday. It explains a lot: the batting off of genuine concerns about corrupt practices (note this does not necessarily mean illegal ones) is now not just routine but the corruption is tacitly and transparently acknowledged as what the ‘winners’ do, only losers are honest and have integrity.
@Niemand, well, quite. Perhaps self-congratulation is the miasmic effluvium of unhealthy art.
For all its interesting lists, Wikipedia’s Art page seems lacking on the topics of lucrative profit, careerist ambition, access to and abuse of warm bodies, avoidance of hard labour, demonising others, unsubtle propaganda, irrational proselytising, reactionary bolstering of the status quo or business as usual or foreign powers, and whitewashing criminality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art#Purpose
Wikipedia’s tedious-brief page on Artwashing is therefore a comic gem (but not in a good way).
Why on Earth would anyone want government oversight of a film festival? Why would anyone want to be told where to live? Very authoritarian (verging on fascist) article.
Spoiler: Nobody has been told where to live. that’s a poor attempt at deflection.
The Dominion cinema has pics from the Edin film fest of the likes of Cary Grant rocking up to the Dominion with Sophia Loren. But in those days people went to cinemas. Now I think they would be very lucky if the CEO of Netflix rocked up.
Local Hero, 1983, by Bill Forsyth.
Has anything surpassed it?
The first Trainspotting was pretty darned good right enough.
Anyway, why waste yir time in Edinburgh? Scottish effing Disneyland.
No real point to this, just passing time, before the Trump protest.
Just another of Angus Robertson’s responsibilities that he neglects. Unless of course there’s a photo opportunity to be had.
It doesn’t matter who is in post, the SNP on culture are an outright disaster, Hyslop was just as bad as Robertson… an outright, unmitigated disaster..
If you spend a couple of hours going through the Screen Scotland webpage and looking in some detail at the projects and producers they are backing, you soon see that Screen Scotland is essentially a much smaller version of the British Film Institute… They share the same philosophy and outlook.
The people who run Screen Scotland, presumably following orders from the people who run Creative Scotland, believe that Scotland and England are the same thing culturally speaking, that we are Britain, not the two distinctive countries of Scotland and England, and that we should be this kind of world centre for film-making in English, a kind of pallid rival to Hollywood where anyone can rock up with the right project and shoot a movie… something like half the projects and producers who are backed are of overseas origin…
Obviously, the people who run CS fail to understand that
a) Scotland is a minority culture in the UK, like Wales and N Ireland, so not at all like the large container culture which is England / Britain… and that
b) England/ Britain can affford to extend such largess because, first of all, they like to feel imperial and colonial and propose and dispose and order foreigners about, and if they can no longer do it with boots on the ground, they can do it through culture, and, more importantly, it doesn’t ever stop them making films about THEIR culture, so we get endless adaptations of Jane Austen and the Tudors, and the British royal family…
When was this policy decided by the SNP? When was all this agreed by the people of Scotland?
When did the SNP ever lay out their plans to administer Scottish culture through Creative Scotland in a way which is more or less indsitinguishable from England?
When did anyone vote for that? Where is the democratic accountability here?
What a nerve they have, Robetson, Hyslop, Sturgeon, what a bunch of chancers they are… the entire SNP leadrship have completely failed the people of Scotland who voted SNP in terms of furthering, promoting and enrichening Scottish culture…
How did we end up with this shower? They are simply awful, giving us essentially New Labour culture policy cooked up 25 years ago in London, a city with more than twice the population of Scotland, when we voted for something new…
Angus Robertson ought to resign, he ought to have resigned already for that Israeli meeting…
Anyway, my days of voting SNP are over, that’s for sure….
Lazy, Angus Robertson and Fiona Hyslop are both lazy people with no obvious interest in Scottish culture, hence the wrong appointments. And I don’t know what to call them, I am at a loss, but they certainly aren’t nationalists..
But the rank and file of the SNP really need to get a grip. What the SNP has done, or not done, over the last 17 years is shocking, not even in my worst nightmares did I ever imagine it could be this bad under the SNP in a sector like film in Scotland which has always been very, very weak, which is in itself something of a problem because the corpus never quite acquires the necessary critical mass…
Where is the Scottish film online data base, once again, like the Catalans have? https://catalanfilms.cat/ca/produccions
How come after 17 years we still don’t have something as simple as that?
Where is the Scottish film catalogue of past / memorable Scottish films, available on DVD with some kind of lierature included? Like a Scottish classics in parnership with a DVD distributor?
It’s well nigh impossible to find a good number of the relatively few films that Scottish directors have made.
Where is Bill Douglas also?
Have Robertson and Hyslop even seen the films of Bill Douglas?
Do they know the worldwide prestige in film circles attached to Douglas’ name?
What about trying to get the Bill Douglas archive from Exter Uni up here, even for a few years, and some kind of event so that young Scottish people can engage with his legacy?
But more than anything else, when was the last time you saw a Scottish feature film, directed by a Scot, based in Scotland, with mainly Scottish actors?
I can’t remember the last time I saw such a film, and that for me amounts to a total failure by Screen Scotland… there should be three or four such films every year, at least, more like seven or eight… we should be making 15-20 feature films a year…
The SNP government have betrayed the Scottish film sector as far as I’m concerned… a total sell-out, quite possibly the only chance to re-set the Scottish film industry on European lines has been squandered by these ignoramuses and buffoons…
All this comes as Screen Scotland’s most recent slate of films hit, or are about to hit, the cinema screens, with HARVEST, a film shot in Scotland by a Greek director, based on a novel by Jim Crace, set in a pre-capitalist past, having opnened on a limited release a couple of weeks ago; ridiculed by Kermode and Mayo on their youtube show for, yes, that’s right, inauthenticity, the film has plumetted 88% in its second weekend at the B.O…
It shows how ridiculous the film industry has become that, as per IMDB, HARVEST has as many as 32 named producers…it sounds like what used to be called a euro-pudding and was surely bound to fail, for the reason that it doesnt take place anywhere concrete and so doesnt ring true… we are Europeans, not Amerixans…
And we have the forthcoming bow of GROW , for which there doesnt seem to be a trailer, and then THE FALL OF DOUGLAS WEATHERFORD, a black comedy with P Mullan, not to mention James McVoy’s debut, which is maybe the film which promises most…
As for diversity, where is gay Scotland on film? Are there no gay people in Scotland? How can they go on about diversity all the time and not shoot anything gay, decades after gay marriage was legalised?
Financing the film of a Greek director in Scotland isnt diversity, the Greeks have their own film industry which boasts a director as world renowned as Theo Angelopolous who did something no Scottish director could do undr the SS / CS regime and shot a famous trilogy on contemporary Greek society…
Looking on the bright side, that is, away from CS and SS, we have the directorial debut of Brian Cox to look forward to…
I don’t know about anybody else, but I consider Cox to be a giant of Scottish culture, much more than just an actor, an author, an intellectual, one of the very best. Like Lynne Ramsay, someone you could – and should – build a whole industry around.
The upcoming GLENROTHAN is written by a Scot (David Ashton), directed by a Scot (Cox), and stars Alan Cumming, Shirley Henderson and Cox himself – lo and behond, three Scots – and is a story about Scottish people…
Bingo, at last, a European film made in Scotland..
No sign of Screen Scotland on the credits obviously…
I am really looking forward to GLENROTHAN… I am pretty sure Brian Cox will make something decent…
As for the eight board members listed on the Creative Scotland webpage, here are their profiles without all the fluff:
1) D. Strachan – former TV producer.
2) D. Cockburn – Director of Planning & Policy at Robert Gordon University.
3) H. Stewart – Creative Director at the BFI
4) L. Wilson – Business “Leader”.
5) M. Abbas – Video game designer and creative.
6) N. Campbell – Head of Arts of British Council in Scotland.
7) P. Brown – qualified chartered accountant.
8) P. Long, CEO of the National Trust for Scotland.
It’s not a line-up which is very creative shall we say and, in any casem is not remotely representative of Scottish society…
Who knew there was such a job as Head of Arts of British Council in Scotland?
But Screen Scotland and the BFI having more or less the same ideology / policy is perfectly well explained by these simplified profiles…
How depressing all this is after 17 years of SNP rule…
Anywa, I better shut up…
I am enjoying this Douglas 🙂
Thanks, Niemand…
We got another round of hot air from the Scottish gov yesterday from Swinney himself who, like his sidekick Robertson, thinks the supreme goal of the “screen industry” is for foreign shoots to come to Scotland and create jobs as opposed to Scottish directors making memorable films. So, 100% on the same page as the rancid George Osborne, David Cameron’s austerity Chancellor.
That might be an acceptable angle for a Minister of Trade, but not a Minister of Culture of a European nation State… It’s just embarrassing, they are embarrasingly ignorant, Kailyard Scotland writ large…
Carla Simon, the young Catalan film director, whose autobiographical films deal with the loss of both her parents to the heroin / AIDS epidemic which devastated Spain in the 80s – not unlike Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh – was in official competition this year at Cannes with her upcoming ROMERÍA.
The Cannes Festival has an unwritten policy which is that, once they pick a director, they tend to stick with them, usually the director has started out in one of the (lesser) sidebar sections. About 70% of the films in the main section tend to be directors who have been in Cannes previously (in the UK, Ken Loach for example, in Spain, Almodovar).
Lynne Ramsay is one of those directors Cannes has backed from the start, one the special few. All her films have screened there in one section of the festival or other. Lynne Ramsay is “in”.
Isn’t it a shame, then, that her films which have screened at Cannes of late are American films and not Scottish films? American themes, and not Scottish themes?
Do Robertson and Swinney not understand that the Cannes Film Festival is like the Olympics of film ? The whole world is watching…
The Catalan government backs Catalan film-makers, and so they have a Catalan presence at the highest level of world cinema, in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Scottish government does not back their film-makers nearly enough, virtually making a career in film impossible in Scotland, and so, despite a world class talent like Ramsay, Scotland isn’t on the big screen at Cannes..
As for Lynne herself, you worry her talent is going to be squandered doing extremely well directed films which are, in the end, of not very much consequence… European artists tends to work best from their own milieu…
I notice Ramsay studied at the Film school in Beaconsfield – a great place but where is the equivalent in Scotland?
I guess there are several things wrapped up here – Ramsay may not be that inspired by Scottish stories (her early influences seem to be very Hollywood) and that is up to her, you don’t have to be. There needs to be a greater weight of directors so those who are interested make their way too. You mention Ken Loach and then there is Mike Leigh in England too and what is interesting about those two is that they make both quite parochial, very English films (not said negatively) as well as bigger more internationally focused work (and sometimes at the same time). And they are both Cannes’ darlings for good reason. Shane Meadows is another.
The ‘theme park’ attitude by politicians in the UK about film production is as you suggest, a shite attitude. It sees the film ‘industry’ as just that – a means to make money so if that comes via US films being made here due to tax breaks and cheapness, great locations and technical expertise but not home-grown artistic direction, national themes, writing, actors, then who cares? It is good for UK PLC (and it seems now, Swinney and Scotland PLC).
Underneath all of this is the question is what is fiction film for? There is no single answer to that but if your answer is ‘income generation’ then it is game over for anything of real value.
There is the Scottish Film Acaedmy in Edinburgh, which is churning out graduates with no obvious jobs to go to every year. Maybe the technicians do somewhat better, but directors and writers are mostly going to leave Scotland or work in TV or end up doing commercials…
With three or four Scottish feature films being shot on average a year – which puts us right at the bottom of the European table – what else are they going to do? These days, they must be leaving film school with lots of debt too and so, to have Swinney and Robertson simple ignore Scottish Culture for 15 years and let the market take care of everything is really a bit much… it really is quite disgraceful of them, they are an embarrassment to the people of Scotland IMO…
Though, actually, not the market precisely; the market grossly distorted by a bogus diversity agenda which is meant to ensure a minimum representation for people of colour, women and LGBT people resident in Scotland, but has been used instead to see the Scottish film industry swamped by incomers who turn up to shoot a film and then leave, more or often than not from England…
There is already a generous UK-wide tax incentive for shooting films in Scotland, but that’s not enough, Screen Scotland insist on topping it up with the tiny pot of money from Scottish tax payers to basically play at being a rights broker on the international market and see their names on the main title credits on films with no cultural relevance to Scotland at all…
I don’t know the circusmtances of the departure of Ramsay to the USA, but the fact is that there is not a single Scottish feature film director who has sustained a career in feature films from Scotland. Not even one in 50 years.
Film directors might take five, six or even seven films to fully find their voice. No Scottish director has ever shot more than three or four feature films from Scotland that I can think of. No wonder they leave.
The people who say there is no point voting are right. It doesn’t matter who you vote for, Scotland is run by the upper echelons of the Civil Service and the quangos they appoint, generally speaking, self-important, busybody types who are ultra cosnervative and dislike the idea of a healthy and autonomous arts sector in Scotland…
The universities are a different matter – salaried professor types are easy enough to control.
But artists? If they were well funded in Scotland, who know what they might get up to…
Is that the Screen Academy Scotland at Napier? I had forgotten that, my error.
Population does account for some things so sustaining a career in Scotland on Scottish-oriented output as a feature director might be difficult. Though it is telling you cannot name one who has ever done that (and you knowledge is much greater than mine).
I dunno, I am with you on the political stuff but also I wish young directors would just do more stuff regardless: it should start at street level and the cheap, high quality gear around these days makes doing it miles more accessible than it has ever been. Where are those DIY people? Maybe they are there then get crushed as the initial enthusiasm gets thwarted?
@Niemand, I’m sure you can find something by searching Youtube for ‘new scottish film shorts’:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=new+scottish+film+shorts
But is cinema’s greatest gift showing us our Self, or is it in portraying the Other? What do Scottish audiences want?
Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote (in Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War) about the travails of Vietnam’s indigenous movie industry being run over by the USAmerican juggernaut. One local director is quoted as saying of Transformers 2: “We were crushed like a bicycle”, as Vietnamese crowds flocked to see the import instead of his own film. Although the author notes that bicycles carting artillery up mountains triumphed over the mechanised French at Dien Bien Phu.
Other nations have successfully (popularly and profitably) lampooned their own history (easier if you’re treating times before a popular revolution, of course), which is perhaps the way to go for whatever ‘authenticity’ fictional cinema can manage, but I feel there’s too much of the po-faced about these Scottish conversations, or a slightly desperate attempt to find heroes from whatever niche. When what we should be doing is freeing ourselves from pernicious ancestor worship. If we portray Scottish (including slavery, religious and colonial) history, it should at least be as horrible as Stockholm Bloodbath (2023) and its modern ilk.
Let’s move forward by exploding the rightwing Great Man (Occasionally Woman) View of History, cursing our rotten ancestors and exposing their foul crimes. The best of Scottish culture, in my view, has been in the exploratory realm of science fiction, not navel-gazing ‘Wha’s like us?’ self-flattery.
Or take Galicia, which isn’t one of Europe’s oldest nation States with an Enlightenment, and a national arts heritage comprable to Scotland, but a primarly rural autonomous region of north western Spain, where they spent last year 6.7 million euros on film and TV I believe… that’s with a population which is less than half of Scotland’s and a much lower GDP per capita, much lowe than Scotland’s…
They have also produced a Cannes winner in the form of Oliver Laxe, whose SIRAT, a story about a father who goes looking for his missing daughter at a rave in Morocco, won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes…
I take your point about a certain lack of intiative in Scotland, Niemand, but I would say that the whole film context is all but absent in Scotland. Maybe Teddy Jameson writes something in the Herald at the weekend, but that is about as much as you are likely to get.. Young people need role models and ours in film don’t bide in Scotland.
It makes for a pretty boring country as far as I’m concerned, film is a whole world with no end, and with reading in such a steep decline, with literary rates according to the OCDE for the first time dropping across the West, it’s importance has never been greater…
Of course, people will always watch films, just not our films, our stories, our struggles and victories and defeats, our culture but those of other nations and regions…
You can’t be a modern European nation State and not have an autonomous film industry…
Sorry, the total film spend in Galicia last year was 10 million euros… So that’s higher than Scotland per capita…
But let’s be very clear: they don’t spend those 10 million on Greek directors, or Finish directors, or Belgians or Germans or anyone but Galicians…
They might coproduce a big Spanish picture with a Madrid producer, Fernando Leon’s MONDAYS IN THE SUN, about two unemployed guys in Vigo springs to mind, but in return for putting up some cash, the Xunta will insist on certain creative key elements being Galician, just as if it were a European coproduction…
Also, the Xunta, the Galician government, just like the Spanish govt, have never seen the need to invent a grotesque and undemocratic quango like Creative Scotland – dealings are directly with the Galician State and its government, the Xunta and its bodies.
Both the Catalan and the Galician governments, about 25 years ago started taking film and TV very seriously. They have been steadily investing in film and TV for over two decades and now, after that effort, they are reaping their rewards, Oliver Laxe and Carla Simón being two of the most interesting voices in European cinema today, and they are far from the only ones.
Their films will almost certainly be selected at Cannes for the foreeable future and Laxe has won some kind of award at Cannes three times by now, while Carla Smión has a Silver Bear from the Berlin Film Festival already to her name…
I would have expected the SNP govt at some point to have organized some kind of systematic analyisis of the Scottish film industry and possible ways to grow it, the Irish did such a thing at the end of the 90s with a panal of international experts invited to Dublin…
Instead, they just keep banging on about film shoots coming to Scotland…
And I think it is worth noting that, in Galicia, there was no film tradition to speak of at all, even less than there was in Scotland, just 25 or 30 years ago. Maybe they had shot five or ten, features.
And yet, they have produced a whole generation of film-makers, with Laxe at the head. So, the lack of a strong tradition is no excuse, it’ s a political question, and let’s face it, the people who run both Scotland and England have a vested interest in keeping Scottish film-makers down, keeping them silent, diluting our voices…
The Catalans, on the other hand, did have a film tradition from way back in the 20th century, they had the Barcelona Film School back in the 60s and 70s with directors like Pere Portobella, who is still alive, and the founder and enfant terrible, Jacinto Esteva (FAR FROM THE TREES) and a good seven or eight other directors.. almost all of whom these days claim they weren’t really part of that experimental film movement…
But they made some great films with almost no money and are kind of a legendary group for some film-makers in Spain today…
@SD ‘But is cinema’s greatest gift showing us our Self, or is it in portraying the Other?’
Are these mutually exclusive? Surely not. The other is ourself too. Fiction can be just as much about getting the audience to fill in their own gaps as giving them it all as well to undercut norms. Have a hero then have them failing. No long dark nights so the soul. No neat resolutions. Embrace the unknown and unknowable. The opposite of those things i.e. the normative conventions, is what I see as po-faced. Have you read any M. John Harrison?
Btw regarding your earlier comments about Scottish sci-fi, I would love to see an Iain M. Banks novel on the big screen but I struggle to think they would not make a huge mess of it.
@Niemand, I think a television series is generally a better bet than one-off film for adapting ‘big idea’ science fiction novels. Modern examples include Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy (not seen that adaption yet), William Gibson’s The Peripheral, and so on. Having said that, blockbuster series like Avatar, Planet of the Apes and Jurassic Park have effectively examined their main topics over multiple movies. Short stories have been successfully adapted for episodic series, while I associate the movie anthology more with horror.
I’m not sure if any of Iain M Bank’s science fiction has been adapted for the screen, although the Culture novels are classic ‘big idea’ vehicles. I must have read short stories and the odd novel by M John Harrison, but so long ago I cannot recall any clearly.
Science fiction has also been given high-quality treatments in computer games, which are distinct from movies and television in potentially offering ethical choices to the player, which I think would tie in nicely to a typical Banks scenario.
When drugs hit Spain in the 80,s a whole generation, the best generetion creatively, musically, were getting tanked up on heroin – “caballo” / horse – because they thought it was like speed or coke or whatever…they didn’t understand what they were taking, and it just totally decimated them… they thought they were rebelling against Franco and his heirs… It was just another rebellion…
So Spain, lost a whole generation of truly incredible song-writers and musicians because of that: Enrique Urquijo, Antonio Flores, Camaron de la Isla, even if he died from lung cancer…
The great Spanish generation of music was destroyed by heroin…
Enrique Urquijo, who I met once through my girlfriend, and who died in a doorway in Malasaña, “barrio” in the centre of Madrid..
The heart breaks from time to time… “But By Your Side”…
https://youtu.be/rYNW1IxaFf4?si=ZDU11Mh9751w6yG3
You obviously have a lot of knowledge about Spain Douglas, what’s the connection?
It’s called, By Your Side…
Dead, I have resuscitated
And planted a tree with my ashes
Some fruit it has given
And since then, something has started
I tore up all my poems
those of sadness and of pain
and I thought about
Being back by your side
Help me like I’d help you…
Today I dreamt
of another life
of another world
By your side…
Today I dreamt of another life
of another world
of being by your side
Help me like I’d help you
Today I dreamt,,,
in another woooooooorld…
In another liiiiiiife…
Right by your side….
Enrique Urquijo ( Los Secretos); musical genius from Spain, killed by a heroin OD in 94…. A true genius, no question…
But to see all these Spanish musical legends die of heroin OD, one after the other, in the nineties, well it was terrible.
And the only reason that was is that my girlfriend at the time, Mar – Sea – was a secretary / peronal assistant of the boss at the big musical agency in Madrid. So he handled all the great Spanish music stars, like Urjijo who died, and their bookings to perform…
So we’d get invited to concerts and things like that, we were peripherals obviously, but we were also young, so it didn’ really matter much and we’d see Urquijo and Luz Casal, and then she was in the next Almodovar film and you were like, oh great, Luz, amazing.
Then Urquijo died, they found him in a doorway, but it wasn’t a surprise because he had been out of his mind for months and he’d come round to the agency where my ex worked, Mar, and beg for money and drugs, and basically, everybody mourned his passing genuinely for musical reasons, but also everyone was secretly glad he was dead, he was a junkie wi no money, and there is nothing worse than that…
Going back in time, when Camaron De La Isla died in 1992, just as I arrived in Spain, that was probably the most amazing thing in Spanish musical history, because Camarón was bigger than Jesus Christ in Spain, and still is.
And he died of lung cancer officially, but he was also a heroin addict so it was probably that…
But when he died, it was absolutely amazing, and very moving…and everybody was wearing the T-shirts of Camaran de La Isla in 1992, and he looked like Jesus Christ, and I’m thinking, “who the fuck is that?! because I knew literally nothing when I arrived in Spain. And it was Camaron de la Isla, of whom, Paco de Lucia said”: “Camarón es la revolucion”…
Then, going back to film, Isaki La Cuesta who is a director I have so much time, made a fictionalised account of Camarón de la Isla’s childhood called “The Legend of Time”, which is the name of the most successful album in Spanish musical history, by Camarón and Paco de Lucia…
It’s a decent film… and Isaki is a legend I think for all the time he must have spent on the picture..
Hi Niemand
I do know quite a lot about Spain by now, and I am tempted to spin you an elaborate yarn about my grandfather being an international brigader, or else my mother having fallen in love with a Spaniard in Seville on that night of Dave Nary’s stunning 25 yard goal against Brazil in the 1982 World Cup, but the truth is simply that I came to live in Madrid on a whim when I graduated and have never quite left, or more like, have never quite been able to leave entirely…
I have seen one country, Spain, absolutely transform itself for the better over 30 years, and another one, the UK sink steadily into decline in a very palpable way, so, for example, both my grandmothers got their cataracts done free on the NHS 30 years ago, whereas my dad was waiting so long he had to eventually go private, and just the other day a friend said that his dad is going private for a small operation for the same reason. That’s decline for you.
Spain had one fast train line, Madrid-Seville, when I arrived in 92, now almost the whole country is covered by high speed railways so you can get on the train at 7.00 am un Madrid and be in Barcelona by 9.00am. It has become small in terms of travel. I admire the Spanish and their get up and go attitude, they are very energetic, can do people and very welcoming to foreigners…
Of course, it has its problems, massive corruption for example, which is endemic and seems to take place no matter who is in power… and then about 15% of the country votes the far right…
But generally speaking, barely a day goes by when I don’t see something I admire about the Spanish. Which other nation on earth had the genius to combine eggs and potato so well in the form of the tortilla de patatas?
And Spanish culture is much underrated, it is more than a match for English language culture, and in some cases, clearly superior…
Spain has overtaken the UK over the last ten years I would say, we are still living in a colonial / imperial State which is falling to pieces around us with our leaders trapped in an idea of themselves as a centre of world power (London rule I mean) when the reality is the roads are full of potholes and the NHS is on its knees… and because so few people speak foreign languages these days, we’re cut off from the rest of Europe….
As for film, and Spanish film, I was just lucky when I started working in it… I fell into it…
But given I really didn’t know much about film before I came to Spain, like most Scottish people – the idea you could actually work in film hadn’t really crossed my mind even – my whole view of film comes from a Spanish angle, not a British or a Scottish one, and that’s a big advantage because film in Spain, while far from being as central as it is in France, does certainly form part of everyday culture…
So, for example, the news bulletin might include a story about a film opening, and the local kiosk has three or four monthly Spanish magazines on film, Fotogramas, Cinemanía, Dirigido Por and Caiman Cuadernos de Cine, which compares well to just one in Britain, the London centric Sight & Sound…
Every Friday morning I go out for breakfast with the newspapers and the weekly cultural magazine EL Cultural and spend an hour or so skimming through the film reviews and the books reviews and, of course, a couple of the opinion columns which are written in Spain mainly by writers, novelists I mean…
It’s one of the things I miss in Scotland, I feel like I never really know what is going on, and if there’s a national debate on culture, it’s all too easy to miss it.
We do have the London Review of Books of course which, despite its name, is virtually Scottish with Ascherson and O’Hagan and James Meek…
But Spanish society has a passion for culture which I can’t say I see to the same extent in the UK, certainly not in England… The passion in the UK is for academia and universities and, above all, money…
Our Minister of Culture in Scotland doesn’t seem remotely phased by the absence of even a monthly cultural magazine…
That’s couldn’t happen in Spain, where the Minister of Culture would get on the phone to a couple of publishers and intelllectuals and writers and business people and thrash out some kind of solution… That would be taboo in free-market, Thatcherite Britain…
Most probably, many of monthly cultural publications here are indirectly subsidized by institutional advertising…
But it really does amaze me that the governing party in Scotland think we can win independence without something as fundamental as a monthly cultural publication, which should really be weekly…
How can they misunderstand culture so much?
Anyway, I am moving back to Scotland and would really like to do something in film. Unfortunately, it looks, just like it always has done, almost impossible…
The film scholar Robin MacPherson wrote a piece some years ago now with all the facts and figures and survival rate of film prodcution companies in Scotland and it was very grim reading…
I know and admire a couple of film producers in Scotland and when I see the kind of films they are making, I just scratch my head, films which have nothing to do with Scotland at all. Given they have made some good Scottish films in the past, I can only assume they are being led into these projects by the entirely misguided film policy of Screen Scotland, who in turn are following the dictates of the absurdly undemocratic Creative Scotland…
Anyway, enough of this…
And I think that is the defining word for Creative Scotland, undemocratic and also elitist…
I mean, for Pete’s sake, how can the national party continue to defend this model?
The board of Creative Scotland is an elitist, undemocratic board which in no shape or form represents Scottish society…
It’s an elitist English invention, and as far as I’m concerned, forms part of the neo-colonial apparatus of oppression…
But no, certainly what I am going to do on selling everything I own in Spain is to set up a film production company, the Glasgow Kino Group, and resurrect the idea of an autonomous and radical film group in Glasgow, the name of which is a tribute to the original group which was led by Norman McLaren and Helen Biggar back in the 1930s.., Working class Scotland on film is my project…
Helen died tragically young but Norman went on to a glittering career in animation… he was described by François Truffaut as a “genius”…
But this is part of what they want, they want us to be amnesic about Scottish film culture and with my wealth of experience in film production, and I doubt there is even one Scot who has been involved in as many pictures as I have, except maybe Ian Smith, when I was at Lola Films in Madrid, we used to shoot 8 pictures a year and I was involved in almost all of them in some shape or form, well, I think it can be done…
I remember the first time I met a film director. Enrique. Still a friend to this day. Enrique had been hired by my boss, the most prolific Spanish film producer of the 90s, to shoot the adaptation of a Spanish novel and I had just started at the production company. What’s called in Spanish, “una pelicula de encargo”.
And then I met Enrique. How did I bond with Enrique? Robert Louis Stevenson, Enrique was an RLS nut. He would grill me about RLS in his tiny, cramped office and back then, knowing virtually nothing about that maestro, I would lie my way out of it, though just being Scottish was half of it…
So the years went by and Enrique, the person who knows most about film ever as far as I’m concerned, went from strength to strength, as I did for a good five or ten years in the Spanish film industry…
When I was a producer for a few years, I would try to sign Enrique for a project, and it almost happened, but he suddenly saw through me and more importantly my backers – quite rightly, terrible people – and pulled out…
More time went by and I gave up the idea of being a film producer, having worked out that directors really want producers with money, or the ability of finding money, and that a Scotsman in Spain, a country with zero diversity laws, was an unlikely prospect and that, in any case, I was never intersted in money, I had just fallen into the role because of the incredibly powerful personality of my ex boss …
But me and Enrique were still friends. We wouldn’t see each other for years, but now and again, maybe having lunch with an editor or a DP, I’d hear about Enrique and ask after him and hear that he has asked after me.
Then it happened, just a few years ago. I was in a Glasgow pizza parlour, that one near the Central Station, when Enrique called me. He was working on a project for one of the American multinationals, the streamers I mean, and about 30% of the series was in English and had been rejected by the American actors, the tranlsation I mean…
He was in a panic. He needed a quick fix and of course I accepted the task and sorted it for him in a manic burst of writing which lasted ten days and ten nights …
That Christmas, I happened to be in Madrid for a few days, in the wonderful working class district of Estrecho, which I highly recommend, and, just in case, I wrote to Enrique to tell him I was there in case he wanted to discuss the new adaptation I had done…
Come at once to see me, he wrote back, and I did, I went to his flat just off La Gran Via, that wonderful, sensational street in the centre of Madrid. and, for the first time, entered Enrique’s flat.
It was a place which was completely impossible to match with the outside of the building, an unending warren of passageways and labrynths and skulleries and verandas, but still, I sojourned on through the mirk…
We had a cup of tea together and then Enrique, for me, my maestro in a sense, burst into tears.
He told me about all the feature film projects he had been on the point of shooting over so many years, which meant so much to him, everything to him, and how they had come unstuck at the last minute, and how, doing a shitty TV series for a streamer didn’t come close…
I sat there humbled and baffled, having thought his whole career, like most people, was an indisputable success story… he has won so many prizes in Spain and is universally loved and admired…
And that was the last time I saw Enrique.
But he has written a book on film, and his insight into film-making is unmatched, and maybe I’ll translate it for no money just to see it published…
PS; But Enrique made time – he’s maybe 5 years older than me – for the young clueless Scottish guy in Madrid who has just arrived and invited him up to his office in Madrid to talk about RLS time and again.
A very, very nice, decent man, Enrique. And I’m thinking, “oh Stevenson, I can talk about that”, having read J&H and Treasure Island, but Enrique is grilling me about The Wrecker and The Wrong Box and Prince Otto,and the correspondence between RLS and LLoyd Osborne and exactly what Fanny’s role is in the success / failure of Robert Louis Stevenson is
LOL… and you realize you don’t really know RLS at all (though now I do)…
That’s Enrique for you , a treasure of a man. And that’s Spain with RLS. You have the English entrance to RLS which goes through Chesterton and Grahame Greene.
And then you have the Spanish route through Borges…
“Como el de Montaigne y de sir Thomas Brown, el descubrimiento de Stevenson es una de las perdurables felicidades que puede deparar la literatura.”
Y: “Robert Louis Stevenson es uno de los autores más escrupulosos, más inventivos y más apasionados de la literatura.”
Why would you doubt which route to take?
And Enrique’s like, “Remember that letter RLS sent to S Colvin on the 6th of March 1888”,—
—and I’m like, “Enrique, seriously, seriously, man in Scotland we don’t do much more than read Jekyll and Hyde and Treasure Island, we don’t go much beyond that, man”
And Enrique’s like, “No that scene in the Wrecker clearly comes from….”
And I’m like, “Enrique, man, steady, I haven’t read the Wrecker, we don’t read it, most Scots have never even heard of it…”
And Enrique’s like, “No, but Henly and that betrayal of Fanny…”
And you’re like a chump sitting there listening to the passion of a Spanish / Basque film director for Robert Louis Stevenson…
Borges claimed RLS for the Spanish canon. That’s what an authoratitive translation does. It claims Stevenson for Spanish letters…
And Stevenson is incredible… he deserves it….
He is practically Spanish by now, and I don’t think he would have minded one bit..
“One of the most long-lasting happinesses which literature can give….”
(Borges on RLS)
But if I was able to have one chance to make a Scottish feature film, I would follow the example of Carlos Saura and shoot a film about Scottish Trad Music.
Carlos Saura, who is a legend in Spain, shot a tiny picture in, I think, 1960, called LA CAZA or THE HUNT. It’s a tiny film, in black and white, and Saura according to his own legend, asked his dad for one million pesetas (which sounds a lot more than it is) and his dad responded by giving him the money in return for the solemn promise that his son would never ask for a penny from him again…
It was a sensation and was selected for the Berlin Film Festival, the story of a group of guys going out for a day’s hunting who end up killing each other – easy enough to interpret as a parable for the Spanish Civil War…
So Saura suddenly became a star director, and was a star director until the very end…
Then, after winning at Cannes and Berlin and everywhere more or less, aged more than 70 he decided to abandon fiction and shoot al series of films about Spanish music, FLAMENCO, then, FLAMENCO, FLAMENCO, then IBERIA, then I don’t know what…
Anway, the point is that FLAMENCO and FLAMENCO, FLAMENCO, are, IMO, among the great works of film art of our time…
The sets, the music, the lighting, the camera movement…
I attach a bit of the (very poor quality) film below, but my dream would be to try to emulate it with Scottish trad music…
And the ending!!!
The camera tracking back and away from the performers, moving through a gallery of classic Spanish paintings, as if to say, “this is our tradition”, before eventually coming right out into the city of Madrid today…
A genuis solution to the eternal problem of THE END….
Brilliant film-maker…
But if I was going for a top ten of Spanish films, I’d go for the following, no more than one director per film:
1) EL VERDUGO / THE EXECUTIONER – Screenplay by Azona, directed by Berlanga, a black comedy about a poor guy who is set to inherit the job of executioner in the Francoist State which he doesn’t want but he has to agree to accept to marry the girl he loves. Hilarious.
2) EL ESPIRITU DE LA COLEMNA / THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE – Victor Eric’e masterpiece about the trauma of post-civil war Spain, seen through the eyes of a girl, though both EL SUR and THE QUINCE TREE SUN are equally memorable. The dance scene in EL SUR with the father and his daughter!!! One of the great moments in world cinema.
3) EL DESENCANTO / THE DISENCHANTMENT – the astonishing true story of one of Spain’s most distinguished literary families, the Paneros, the father, a fascist poet of the Francoist regime, and the son, Leopoldo, also a poet, only a psychotic one, who ended up in a lunatic asylum. A documentary which started out as one thing and ended up as another.
4) LA FLOR DE MI SECRETO / THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET – Almodovar’s turn to serious melodrama, with a truly astonishing performance by Marisa Paredes as Leo, a hack writer of romantic novels who must learn to live without her great love. One of the great performances in Spanish cinema and the film which confirmed Pedro as a major talent.
5) ARREBATO / RAPTURE – Recently voted the best Spanish film of the last 50 years, directed by the enfant terrible, Ivan Zulueta, another heroin addict, the film is a story about addiction, to heroin and to cinema. Original, extarordinary and totally unllike anything you have ever seen. A cult classic.
6) EL VERANO DE 93 / THE SUMMER OF 93 – Carla Simon’s attempt to reconstitute the ghosts of her dead parents over three films is one of the most moving and touching projects of our time. Cinema as a kind of redemption. As Carla said, “Cinema is a way of being in the world”.
7) FLAMENCO, FLAMENCO – Carlos Saura’s brilliant, elegant, fascinating take on one of the music extraordinary musical traditions on the planet, flamenco, the music of the “gitanos” (gypsies).
8) UN INFORME GENERAL DEL ESTADO DE LAS COSAS / A GENERAL REPORT ON THE STATE OF THINGS – Pere Portobella’s three hour documentary on the state of Spain in 1976 as the Franco regime began to collapse, which he shot clandestinely and includes all of the main figures of the Spanish Transition to democracy…
9) VACAS / COWS – whatever happened to Julio Medem? His debut feature follows a Basque family over several generation, from the Carlist wars of the 19th century right up to the mass executions of the Spanish Civil War. A wonderful debut.
10) TRISTANA – You could pick any Luis Buñuel to be in your top ten, but this adaptation of the novel by Perez Galdos is Buñuel at his best, starring two of the greats in Catherine Denueve and Fernando Rey. Buñuel said he only wanted to shoot it because Tristana, the Denueve charcater, has a false leg and he was of course a great fetishist….
I could list another 20 pictures of course…
Thanks for all of this Douglas. I read it all with great interest, some fascinating personal insights and stories. One small observation is that it is always interesting and good when someone from a different culture / country gets deeply inspired by a foreign cultural figure and ends up knowing and understanding them far more than the natives. It is one counter to the idea that national cultural output need be the sole domain of the locals (I think about the virtually unknown young Canadian Hilary Harris’s direction of ‘Seawards the Great Ships’, an inspired idea by Grierson at the time).
Good luck with the film company idea!
Thanks Niemand…
Here is Manolo Sanlucar, one of the greatest guitar players in the world, just before he died a few years ago… another musical genius from Spain…
https://youtu.be/ERnQk48Tbp8?si=59aRaTL0qRBsNVgH
It was perhaps an odd choice for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language to make it’s ‘word’ for the week:
https://dsl.ac.uk/our-publications/scots-word-of-the-week/heres-tae-us/