1. NEIGHBOURS
Norman McLaren, UK, 1952, 8min
Cast: Grant Munro and Jean Paul Ladouceur
A brilliant short animation about understanding between people – the theme of our festival. It won an Oscar and the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso called it the greatest film ever made!
2. I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING!
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1945, 91min
Cast: Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey, Pamela Brown and Finlay Currie
A beautiful, headstrong woman wants to get to a Scottish island to meet her fiancé, but fog and storms keep her on the mainland, where she meets a dashing landowner and discovers secrets of the heart. Directed by Britain’s most visual filmmakers, who won many international awards, and acclaimed by American director Martin Scorsese, I Know Where I’m Going! is about the sensory overload of Scotland and how it can change lives.
3. CULLODEN
Peter Watkins, UK, 1964, 75min
Cast: George McBean and Alan Pople
From the romance of Scotland to the grit of its history: In 1746, an uprising of Scottish Jacobites was brutally defeated on a bleak moor by the government army of King George II. The tragedy casts a shadow across Scottish history. Multi-award-winning director Peter Watkins’ brilliant idea is to tell the story as a news report, as if TV cameras were there. So we have a journalist’s voice over, and newsreel imagery that digs into the battle. This was groundbreaking, the first great docu-drama. Seldom has history on film seemed so close. Screened with a surprise… something very different!
4. PORTRAIT OF GA
Margaret Tait, UK, 1955, 7min
A gorgeous wee impressionistic film, about the director’s granny eating a sweet!
5. TOUCH THE SOUND
Thomas Riedelsheimer, Germany/UK, 2004, 99 min
A boldly cinematic documentary about the deaf Scottish musicologist Evelyn Glennie, the first solo percussionist in 20th Century Western Society, a Grammy Award winner, the Scotswoman of the Decade, who has 15 Honorary Doctorates and several lifetime achievement awards. Thomas Riedelsheimer won a British Academy Award for this sonic and visual treat, plus awards in Bangkok, Leipzig and Locarno. Quite right too.
6. SEAWARDS THE GREAT SHIPS
Hilary Harris, UK, 1960, 29min
Produced and designed by pioneer John Grierson, who gave the documentary genre its name and helped found it. This Oscar-winning short, which was two years in the making, tells the story of one of the world’s great powerhouses of shipbuilding, the River Clyde. Now that such shipbuilding is gone there, the movie is an elegy for a lost world.
7. FRANZ KAFKA’S IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
Peter Capaldi, UK, 1993, 23min
Cast: Richard E. Grant and Crispin Letts
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FRANZ KAFKA’S IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE |
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Writer Franz Kafka wants one of his characters to morph into something else, but what could that be? A singing beetle by any chance? Director Peter Capaldi’s hilarious film again connects comedy and surrealism in Scotland, and bagged an Oscar.
8. BEGONE DULL CARE
Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, UK/Canada 1949, 8min.
Splashes of zingy colour! This dazzling abstract animation timed to a jazz score by legendary Oscar Peterson shows why Norman McLaren is considered one of cinema’s great innovators.
9. GASMAN
Lynne Ramsay, UK, 1997, 15min
Cast: Lynne Ramsay Jr., Martin Anderson, James Ramsay and Denise Flannagan
Talk about cinema of dreams? Lynne Ramsay’s gorgeous film boldly frames out the heads of adults so that we bore into the unsettling world of kids.
10. THE BILL DOUGLAS TRILOGY:
MY CHILDHOOD; MY AIN FOLK; MY WAY HOME
Bill Douglas, UK, 1972; 1973; 1978, 175min (total)
Cast: Stephen Archibald, Hughie Restorick, Bernard Mckenna
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MY CHILDHOOD
MY AIN FOLK
MY WAY HOME |
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A young boy, Jamie, lives in an impoverished coal mining community outside Edinburgh. His mother is in an asylum; his grannies are cold hearted. He’s sullen and feral. Gradually, an artistic spirit emerges within the boy, which has the potential to save his life. The granite emotions in these movies are overwhelming. The camera position and framing are as assured as Dovzhenko, as Fei Mu, as Yasujiro Ozu. Douglas’s cine-autobiography won three prizes at the Berlin Film Festival, the Silver Lion at Venice, the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain award and the Sutherland Trophy. The University of Exeter in England has devoted a whole centre to the study of Bill Douglas, despite his having made only four films. His trilogy is a masterpiece about touch, reconciliation and recovery. Plus a musical treat!
11. SPACE TRAVEL ACCORDING TO JOHN
Anders Jedenfors, Jamie Stone, UK, 2008, 3min
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SPACE TRAVEL ACCORDING TO JOHN |
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A beautifully eccentric, award-winning stop-frame animation journey through a 10-year-old boy’s reflections on space travel.
12. RATCATCHER
Lynne Ramsay, UK/France, 1999, 94min
Cast: William Eadie, Leanne Mullen, Tommy Flanagan
Glasgow, the summer of 1973. A family moves out of the city. Their son’s imaginative world opens up to the sky and to cornfields. Few movies take us into the fecund mind of a child as does Ratcatcher, considered the greatest feature debut in modern Scottish cinema. Lynne Ramsay’s film won 11 film festival prizes. The San Francisco Chronicle said that it “has an artistic purity as penetrating as its central character’s gaze.” Ratcatcher compares with the early films of Zhang Yimou.
Photo permissions:
- Stills from ‘Culloden’ and the Bill Douglas Trilogy
Please credit ‘British Film Institute’ or ‘BFI’
- Poster photo of Tilda Swinton
Please credit any use of this photo (however manipulated) to Jean-Baptiste Mondino
- Stills from ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’, ‘Gasman’, ‘Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life’, ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Space Travel’
No credit required
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