Review by Northings
Screenplay 2009
10 Sep 2009 in Festival, Film, Shetland, Writing
Various venues, Shetland, 28 August-6 September 2009
SHETLAND’S film and book festivals, Screenplay and Wordplay, had the islands in creative mood with a programme of events and screenings that stretched from Fair Isle to Unst.
Willem Cluness introducing 'Böd' (© Dave Hammond)
Celebrated film critic Mark Kermode kicked off Screenplay with a trip to the UK’s ‘most northerly cinema’, on Shetland’s northernmost island, Unst. It has a famously eccentric, decorated bus shelter where the cinema was set-up and the story made the national news with its quirky take on film, Shetland-style.
Kermode, along with Linda Ruth Williams ,are the passionate visiting curators behind Screenplay. They love film and, luckily for us, they love Shetland. Linda explained that they work for months in advance with Shetland Arts staff to bring together the programme of screenings and events: “I love to come to Shetland. It takes nine months to set up Screenplay, and it is surreal when we actually get here. We arrive and jump in at the deep end”
Terence Davies is the director of Kermode’s Best Film of 2008, Of Time and The City, and he does not like to travel. He is not a good flyer and doesn’t particularly like boats. This makes Shetland a somewhat challenging destination.
Kermode impressed upon Davies how special an event this is and the director agreed to venture north. But it was only when they met at Edinburgh airport that Kermode “knew it was going to be OK”.
Davies’ films gave this year’s festival a unique tone. Along with Of Time and The City, they included House of Mirth and The Long Day Closes, all introduced by the director. A true treat for the Shetland audience.
The films are elegantly gloomy and extremely poignant. By contrast, the man himself came across as a jolly soul in the flesh and regaled us with tale upon outrageous tale during a question and answer session in Lerwick’s Garrison Theatre.
International films included the animated Waltz With Bashir. In this film Ari Folman creates a curious and deeply disturbing world of animation set upon live footage. The film seeps into cracks in the fragile reality and disrupted memories of a massacre in the minds of two men who had been conscripts in the Israeli Army. A sombre audience quietly shuffled out into the night after that one.
Frank Hurley’s silent epic South tells the story of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions between 1914 and 1916 and was shown in Fair Isle, Lerwick and Unst. Dean DeBlois’ Heima played to a large late-night audience who chilled out to the sounds of Sigur Rós and mesmerising footage of Iceland.
Short films from the National Film Board of Canada demonstrated what can happen when a nation has a long term and supportive attitude to its filmmakers. And Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle made the trip to Fair Isle and Lerwick where it delighted audiences of many ages
Scottish films included Simon Miller’s Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle, which was the first feature-length Gaelic film to gain theatre release, and Charles-Henri Belleville and Tim Barrow’s The Inheritance, made in eleven days and for £5000. Both prove what can be done in Scotland with big imaginations and a lot of ambition.
Home Made was a jam-packed night featuring over two hours of short films from Shetland. There was love, explosions, tragedy, tears, comedy, fantasy, sci-fi, gore, imagination and special effects in bucket-loads. The packed theatre was buzzing with reaction, laughter and clapping.
Maddrim Media is a group of young Shetland film-makers. Their films were up first and they had submitted everything from spoof comedies to surreal horror.
Harry Whitham’s Doll Tears was a silent film presented in its original form, whereby the images on screen are accompanied by live music, in this case played and composed by Harry. Using film to explore clothing and fashion he combined haunting music, elegant visuals and Victorian macabre with a hint of a story. A stunning little film.
Willem Cluness’ Böd also had glimmers of magic. This horror flick milked some clichés and upended others. It was a teen slash movie with comic quirks, Shetland-style. It was brash and lo-fi, but just oozed that slippery sense of something big brewing in an imaginative and creative young mind.
Notable too was the short and poignant Sugar Bricks by Aidan Nicol and Roseanne Watt which juxtaposed the sweet, innocent pleasures of confectionary with domestic aggression. It was very sad.
Love Letters in The Sand, also by Aidan Nicol, was like a love letter to the stunning land and seascapes of St. Ninian’s Isle in Shetland’s south end. There was some beautiful cinematography and a delightful sense of timeless romance. AMOC by Matthew Nicolson was a story with a twist in the tail that made subtle, clever use of sound to disturb and unsettle.
Made in Shetland was the adult section – age not content! Like Maddrim, this was varied in terms of cinematography and storytelling but it was enormously exciting to see the sheer range of films being produced in Shetland.
A new film group called Bigger Than The Bag showed several films. Be My Little Echo by Andrew Lindsay was striking piece in a dark, unsettling way.
Knit by Hilary Seatter combined animation and textiles, and had some interesting ideas and drawings.
There were two films by Philip Taylor, both meditative and powerful. Your Papers, Please looked at identity and menacing bureaucracy, while North was starkly beautiful, apocalyptic and terribly lonely. Well-produced and thoughtful work.
To see Shetland represented and imagined in so many ways on the big screen was striking. There were beaches, sea, boats, crofts, landscapes, town, country, an exploding bank, a doctors’ surgery – it goes on and on. The islands’ beauty but also their darkness and complexity were stunningly portrayed.
Several nights later Terence Davies charismatically urged us to protect and celebrate or own culture, and to look with filmmakers eyes to Europe, not America. His sparkling tirade rang true with many and brought applause from the audience.
It was interesting to consider this alongside the opinions Anne Mensah, Head of Independents for the BBC, had expressed during the panel discussion, Small Screen: Big Ideas on Friday night. Mensah had spoken enthusiastically about aspects of American styles of programme making.
For a few evenings, then, Lerwick sizzled as a hotbed of influential opinion on film and television-making of national import. The ideas that were aired here in Shetland were certainly food for thought.
Another Small Screen: Big Ideas panellist was crime writer Ann Cleeves, who has had a thirty-year “love affair” with Shetland. The islands have, in her own words, “changed her life”. The success of her Shetland Quartet of books has seen her writing published in dozens of languages and she has just sold the option to bring her work to screen.
Shetland Arts’ Kathy Hubbard has long been central to the success of Screenplay, and reflected on this year’s event: “The festival went even better than I had hoped for, and the mixture of old films, relatively new films, archive and silent film, animation and music film seemed to go down well with a range of audiences. The outreach sessions were particularly rewarding, with schools, care centres, community halls and even a bus shelter in the mix.”
Linda Ruth William’s and Mark Kermode’s genuine affection for Shetland is palpable and I suspect will become regarded as having been very important for the development of film in Shetland in the future.
Locally made films are on the up and more filmmakers are being encouraged to come to the islands to visit and, importantly, to make work. Shetland’s incredible light and extraordinary land and seascapes have long been a pull for those of the visual persuasion.
A local production company were recently working on a documentary for Arte Europe about the people behind the emergency services in Shetland. Filming had taken place in May and the crew were back in Germany when a panic call came in, a vital scene of an injured canoeist was missing.
A canoe and boat were scrambled that morning, HD film shot and the rushes transmitted by broadband upload to Berlin that night. They were in the final cut by the next morning.
The ease of getting things done quickly (i.e. we need a canoe and a boat now – fine, I know a man….) in a small communities and clever use of new technology make serious film-making in Shetland, and across the Highlands and Islands, a real opportunity to be grasped.
Events like Screenplay help to encourage and develop such opportunities for local and visiting talent alike. The weekend left local audiences buzzing and I heard quite a few leaving the Shetland screenings saying that they were off to make something to submit next year.
© Karen Emslie, 2009
