Cromarty Arts Trust and Cromarty Arts Society will present an Open Air Screening of 'Petrolia', a film by Emily Richardson, which will be projected onto the wall of the Lighthouse, Cromarty on Saturday 12th November 2005.  at 6.30 pm.
 
Petrolia takes its name from a redundant oil drilling platform sat in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years.

Shooting on 16mm film, using time lapse and long exposure techniques, the film presents a record of industrial phenomena, - the toxic beauty of an oil refinery at Grangemouth, huge drilling platforms gliding across the water as they come in for maintenance and repair at Nigg and the last dance of the shipbuilding cranes in Glasgow harbour.

Benedict Drew has created the soundtrack for the film using purely electronic, computer generated sound that works with the threshold between silence and noise as the image works with that between the visible and invisible.

Petrolia was commissioned by The Lighthouse Centre in Glasgow for a touring exhibition, 6000 miles, about the changing nature of the Scottish coastline. It has also been shown at Cinematexas and Chicago Underground film festivals in the US and has been selected for the Kunst Film Biennale in Cologne and OXDOX, Oxford Documentary Film Festival.

Emily Richardson received an MFA in Filmmaking from San Francisco Art Institute and now lives and works in London. Her films are distributed by LUX and have been shown at festivals internationally including London, New York, Hong Kong, Rotterdam and Edinburgh. Her film Redshift was included in A Century of Artists Film in Britain at Tate Britain last year. A book of her work, Time Frames, has recently been published by Stour Valley Arts, distributed by Cornerhouse, Manchester.

Emily will be there to present the film, and answer questions afterwards. Wrap up well and bring flasks!
If too wet, the film will be shown in the Old Buoy Store (ex British Legion). For tickets or more information  e-mail info@cromartyartstrust.org.uk  or 01381 600 777. Also check out www.emilyrichardson.org.uk