The Scots Day Out Festival opens this week and just ahead of the launch, we’re pleased that we’re partnering the SDO festival and we’ll be presenting 2 nights of Scottish-made short films on Thursday 11 Feb & Friday 12 Feb in Bendigo, Australia.
It’s fascinating that Chris Earl and the SDO team are planning to hold the screenings in a working gold mine – the Central Deborah Gold Mine – and we’ve attached some images of the venue.
It’s a really interesting venue and, as you can see, we don’t think light pollution will be a problem with film exhibition there, unless they get reflected glare from rich seams of pure gold ore – which would be one interesting problem we don’t have to deal with here!
The festival has been expanding rapidly since beginning in 2013 and is aimed at the Scottish Diaspora in Australia. This year they are expecting no less than 6,000 visitors over the weekend of the 12th/13th February. The events give locals and visitors a taste of Scottish culture and last year we were approached by Chris Earl, the festival director, who asked us to put together a programme of Scottish-made short films for screening at the event and we were happy to oblige, so we’ve put together a programme of some of our favourite Scottish short films produced over the last few years:
Our favourite romantic comedy LOVE CAKE directed by Eleanor Yule and screened at the 2014 ESFF. We’re sure the good people of Bendigo will enjoy French rom-com inspired comedy, with the most sensually charged bakers kitchen we’ve seen in short film to date!
We’re also screening the same year’s ARTY ANNY by Marcin Walczak, who’s thoroughly inspiring documentary follows the determined efforts of a near-blind artist to pursue her art, in the face of near-insuperable difficulties. Somewhere, in Ayrshire, there is a spider in a cave that could pick up some lessons on perseverance from Marcin’s eponymous subject!
Cameron Richardson’s YOU ARE GOING TO DIE is a neat, taut little thriller with a good central performance about a doomed hero and his increasingly frenzied efforts to escape his inevitable fate. Ewan Stewart’s wonderful GETTING ON won best film at the London Short Film Festival after we were lucky enough to screen it in Edinburgh and deservedly so as it follows the humdrum everyday life of a Glaswegian housewife whose day takes an extraordinary turn when she meets an unexpected visitor!
SKEKKLING by Louise Scollay is another documentary that explores the richness of Shetlandic folk culture and the tradition of Skekkling (or guising) which has been handed down as a folk tradition over centuries and still practiced in the islands today.
Emma Dove’s documentary ON ANOTHER NOTE follows the work of another determined artist, Sarah Kenchington, whose desire to discover music led her to invent a range of novel and decidedly Heath-Robinson musical instruments from junk. The film is both quirky and heart-warming as Sarah follows her art to the bemusement of the local community.
Royal Academy graduate, Christine Hooper’s film ON LOOP was another favourite and uses it’s Glaswegian dialect to good effect in this mash-up of art, poetry, animation and stop-motion and most importantly, humour!
We’ve also sent them Glasgow-based film-maker Thomas Simpson’s dark, supernatural short film LAST EXIT in which death pays a visit to an everyday Scottish household and Oaty Hill Productions short film THE KARAOKE KILLERS was screened at the ESFF 2011 but also featured at the Berlin Festival of British Film and at Sensoria Music and Film Festival and features murderous obsession and jealousy in the Edinburgh Karaoke scene as well as a plethora of Scots music, a noir-esque atmosphere and quirky characters in a dark, ironically comic, romp through the Scottish folk repertoire!
All this and a gold mine too!
http://www.scotsdayout.com/
