Light in the North

GEORGINA COBURN catches up with MATT LLOYD, Coordinator of the Rural Cinema North Project and creator of the Virtual Film Club website for the north of Scotland

GEORGINA COBURN: Can you tell us a bit about your background?

MATT LLOYD: Well I moved up here from Edinburgh, in fact I’m still halfway between here and Edinburgh! For the last five or six years I’ve worked amongst other people for the Edinburgh Film Festival. I started off in the press office, then the industry office and I now programme short films for them and alongside that I make films when I can. I’ve worked on a lot of other people’s films but I’ve just finished my first proper budgeted ten minute short film so I’m sending that off to festivals at the moment. I’ve also worked for BAFTA Scotland and various cinemas.

Matt Lloyd © Ewan Weatherspoon

GC: When were you first bitten by the film bug?

ML: I was thinking about this the other day, there was an age where I just knew I wanted to be in film but I don’t remember the day I actually realised this, it just became a gradual thing. It’s not a family thing at all. I just liked spending my time in dark rooms!

GC: Along with loads of other people!

ML: (laughing)Yes!

GC: So there was no one film that sparked it off?

ML: The earliest film experience I remember was ‘Mary Poppins’ and waiting at the end for the actors to come out from behind the screen and finding it very odd when they didn’t!

GC: Have you been surprised by the amount of film activity up here since you started the job?

ML: Absolutely! It’s interesting, there are a lot of groups that have been quietly getting on with things for years and groups that have been running and have then died out. It was really nice when I was emailing round people getting in touch with venues, people were saying we’ve been thinking about it for a while but weren’t sure how to get started or someone used to run it but they had moved away.

Up here often it is the only film provision. It’s slightly different to a film society in a city where it’s a bunch of Buffs that want to show some obscure Ukrainian film from the 1920’s! Here it is people who just want to watch films, which is a much wider and much more approachable bunch of people. But there are gaps in certain areas.

GC: Have you been approached by many people to start up film groups and where do you see those gaps logistically in the Highlands?

ML: It’s a mixture of me approaching people and people coming to me. There doesn’t seem to be much going on in Ross & Cromarty, although those areas are still quite close to Inverness. Caithness has the All Star Factory and Sutherland has the newly formed Golspie Film Society. Those areas served by commercial cinema are less active, otherwise there is a quite even spread.

There are great things going on. I just heard today about a sixteen year old boy down in Ardnamurchan who runs touring films around various venues and has just won a Young Scot Award for it. It really depends on individual people who care enough to actually put the hours in.

GC: Yes, it is dependent on voluntary work. The site you’ve developed is very user friendly. There are quite a lot of considerations in setting up a society and it demystifies the process.

ML: That was certainly the aim and part of the aim was also to free me up to work on specific projects with basic information being provided on the site. There’s the Scottish Branch of the BFFS who do this kind of work as well, they’re all volunteers and are based down in the central belt. The fact that Virtual Film Club is affiliated with the HI~Arts website is great, a lot of people can come to it through that, and there are also people who might not know to go to the BFFS site.

GC: What has the response been so far to the site’s block booking scheme?

ML: Fairly muted so far. What I had hoped originally was to set up a scheme with Film Bank, the main distributor of mainstream films. It just made sense that people are showing the same film in a lot of different places. It might be possible to reduce rates that way. I’m afraid Film Bank weren’t interested so it evolved into a way of promoting a few rarer titles and also documentaries. People think, documentaries? I can see them on TV…

GC: No, Not really.

ML: No, not good ones. Documentary screenings attended by the filmmakers can be the most exciting experiences because there is so much to talk about after the film.

Its early days for the block booking scheme, people programme at different times as well. What I’m thinking of doing is approaching people when they’re programming their next season and ask what they are thinking of showing. I may then have ten groups that want to show a particular film. Maybe that will be a more beneficial way of doing it.

The whole point of my job at the moment is that it is a two-year pilot scheme. No one has really done this before. I’m learning about a new area. The last thing I want to do is impose on other programmes what I think they should be showing. That’s not the idea at all. It is just to facilitate and suggest things if needed.

Matt Lloyd © Ewan Weatherspoon

GC: What developments will there be through the rural development scheme in relation to making films?

ML: There’s a few possibilities in the mix. I’ve just been advising Moray Council Arts team on an application to First Light, which is a youth film making scheme. I’m also talking to Dundee Contemporary Arts who run the Discovery Children’s Film Festival, that’s only been running for a couple of years so far, they show foreign films to children and take them into schools. They are also linking up with various film making groups.

I’m approaching the various regional arts officers and seeing if there are things we can collaborate on for funding. I met Roxana Meechan up in Sutherland the other day. There are amazing things going on in Sutherland. It’s more orientated towards new media and visual art than specifically film. You think with film there’s immediately a big crew, but it’s possible for one visual artist or film maker to work with a group of young people.

I’ve been speaking to someone down in Edinburgh who wants to bring over a 16mm experimental film maker from the US to do scratch film workshops with kids. They scratch into the celluloid, sew or even staple, and she has an optical printer with her and prints them up so they screen them there and then. Working with film rather than video it’s that tactile and that immediate, it’s fantastic, and it’s such a good way of drawing them into viewing the sort of experimental films that might otherwise be seen as inaccessible. There are also several other projects in development that I hope to announce soon. Schools are getting better and better at developing visual literacy.

GC: And developing an audience.

ML: Things are moving on so radically. It is now “screen industries”, there are so many opportunities for internet-based things. That makes a lot of sense up here because of the remoteness of communities. The internet is a great resource.

GC: It’s a great way of sharing what you have produced.

ML: Exactly. There is definitely still a space for so called traditional film making though and through this network of screening venues I would like to start touring programmes of short films either made by people locally or bring up from down south or international work.

GC: It’s a great idea. Normally you just don’t get the chance to see it. At last year’s Inverness Film Festival I saw some fantastic shorts from Scotland, they had so much to say. It’s amazing what you can say in a short space of time.

ML: People don’t realise this within Scotland but internationally Scottish short films are very much admired. It is a very strong form but I think you’re right people don’t watch short films.

It’s hard. If you live in Gairloch and you get films on DVD or what comes in on the Screen Machine you’re seeing big Hollywood films. To imagine yourself making films, there’s such a gap. Whereas short films, anyone can make a short film. All it needs is imagination. It doesn’t matter if it looks cheaply made. It’s all about what you can do with your resources.

People who are making films up here aren’t getting to show them to the wider community. What seems to have been coming up more often in the last five years in cities in the UK are short film nights in bars or in people’s front rooms. It’s an opportunity to show their work, see other people’s work and feed off each other. I don’t see why that couldn’t happen up here as well. What I’d really love to see is a community of film makers up here just like there is a cross region community of musicians. It’s just a new way of communicating for people, made increasingly easy by digital technology.

GC: Are you considering profiling some local film makers on the site?

ML: I have started to approach a few people. The majority have been visual artists or media artists. The film making section of the site is under construction, it could go in a number of different directions. There is so much to be done. I would like to feature specific short films once a month for people programming screenings, feature filmmakers, things like that.

GC: What about education?

ML: Definitely. We want to add more links. One of the seven UK screen academies that have just been formed, one is based in Edinburgh. There are opportunities to stay in Scotland.

GC: I’ve heard Dundee is very good.

ML: Yes, very good for animation. Mark Cousins a few months ago did a speech about film in Scotland and in it he asked why can’t we have a world class cinematographer’s school in Assynt? The quality of light, it would be amazing. To have some kind of international, residential school in the middle of Highlands…

GC: It would be the perfect place for it.

ML: I’d love to do what they do in Finland at the Midnight Sun Festival, way up in the artic circle in the summer. People lie in this big tent and they just screen new world-class films 24 hrs a day. Just imagine if you could do something like that in Shetland?! It is an exciting time for the North of Scotland. I think people are realising that there are ways of working in a remote environments. The more cultural provision there is for people the better. There are all these pockets of activity that aren’t advertised outside their community that bind the community together.

GC: I think the fact that there are so many film clubs around means that people are still attracted to the group experience of watching films in spite of home DVDs, video games.

ML: It is easy enough to get DVD’s even in remote areas with postal services like ‘Love Film’, it is comfortable to sit in your front room and not a draughty church hall, but you’re right, people still do it. People still see the value of it. The one group that I don’t think go to screenings in village halls are 16 to 25 year olds. It’s just not seen as “cool”, but they’re the ones who could be making films and having them screened.

GC: I was quite interested in the press this week, the media coverage of a Hollywood blockbuster being filmed here. The US stars have arrived! Scotland being used as a location for big budget film, it sends an image of our landscape across the world. What I think would be nicer is the same degree of coverage for local people behind the camera. We tend to view the film industry here as location tourism rather than a creative industry in its own right. I’m thinking of the likes of ‘Braveheart’ (which was mostly filmed in Ireland).

ML: Yes. Of course it is important, it brings a lot of money into an area and I’m sure that it employs other people. But there are so many other stories and other images of the Highlands to show. You mentioned Skye just then, next month Chris Young, a producer based on Skye, is shooting a Gaelic language feature which is fantastic. I moved up here partly because I have stories I’d like to tell up here.

GC: So what is it about the place?

ML: I think the image that gets shown of the Highlands is of a romantic bleak wilderness. Well, it’s not a wilderness. There’s so much more to be said about here.

© Georgina Coburn, 2006