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Email PageHome Truths and Distant WorldsMATT LLOYD explains the thinking behind the programme for the 4th Inverness Film Festival |
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| SIXTY YEARS ago there were only three film festivals in the world – Cannes, Venice and Edinburgh. Now the UK alone boasts around two hundred. A few are internationally recognized star-fests, some cater for specific tastes – French cinema, for example, or horror films – whilst others provide the only non-mainstream programming a particular region can offer. There is considerable competition between festivals for the best films, so the challenge for any programmer is to carve out a unique festival identity, whilst still attracting a wide audience. It was with this in mind that Paul Taylor, Eden Court’s cinema programmer, and I approached our first Inverness Film Festival programme. As a young festival – this will be its fourth year – we felt it was time Inverness declared its intentions in an informal manifesto. |
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Thanks to Eden Court’s regular, excellent film programme, there was no obligation to show specific titles which otherwise wouldn’t reach the city. At the same time, we had no desire to come up with something so esoteric that it would only appeal to a tiny minority. So we settled on two distinct but complementary themes – Scottish, particularly Highland, cinema, and an international programme entitled ‘Distant Worlds’. Ultimately, we want Inverness Film Festival to offer a programme unlike any other in the UKAs the UK’s most northerly film festival, we felt Inverness’s programme should reflect the values of the Highlands, whether through revisiting classic local films, or through selecting international titles set in remote and dramatic locations, in which ancestry and storytelling are to the fore. Films from varied and distant worlds demonstrate a common sense of humanity, which is, after all, the most important message cinema can offer. Amongst the Scottish films on offer is the Scottish premiere of The Last King of Scotland. Directed by Oscar winning Kevin MacDonald (One Day in September, Touching the Void) this is an extraordinary imagining of a young Scottish doctor seduced by the charisma of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. |
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Skye-born director Douglas MacKinnon will introduce his film The Flying Scotsman as the closing night gala. Starring Johnny Lee Miller and Brian Cox, the film is a fantastic recreation of Scottish cyclist Graeme Obree’s fight against depression and institutional snobbery. The Island Tapes is a live performance of new musical scores to silent black and white films of life on Scottish islands in the 1920s and 30s. From the archives, we chose a Hebridean double-bill of Play Me Something (1989), starring John Berger and Tilda Swinton, and the rarely seen dark melodrama The Brothers (1947), a sort of dark riposte to I Know Where I’m Going, which features probably the only death by gull and herring in cinema history. The ‘Distant Worlds’ programme features films set in extreme environments and so-called peripheral cultures, and includes the breathtakingly beautiful Inuit film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, the first ever film in an Aboriginal language, the wonderful and funny Ten Canoes, and the astonishingly-titled 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, an off-beat documentary following the Pamir Kirghiz tribe of Central Asia. These are three new films in which marginalised, indigenous communities tell their stories, the cast of each film playing their own grandparents. |
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Alongside the screening, we are running a series of masterclasses and workshops to encourage Highland filmmakers to develop their skills and experience. |
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