Better Worlds: Take One Action 2025 preview

Take One Action (TOA), Scotland’s film festival for social change, has had a reinvention. The upcoming edition will be its 17th, but the first of a new biennial structure that’s been introduced to create deeper ties with the various communities the festival serves and build a model that prioritises the well-being of the festival's small, dedicated team. Rather than a week-long event, the new-look TOA will take the form of weekenders in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness and Dundee, spread over three months, with local co-programmers from each city putting on additional events that reflect their priorities and interests.

Overseeing TOA’s transformation is Rachel Hamada, who joined the festival last year as director. Hamada’s background is in investigative journalism – she helped found crowd-funded investigative journalism collective The Ferret, and currently works as a community organiser for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism – and tells me she finds plenty of overlap between uncovering news and her new role at TOA. “The ultimate goal of TOA is quite similar to investigative journalism; it's just a slightly different method of getting there.” They’re both about communicating information to people, and she reckons the film festival might have the edge in this goal. “There's quite a lot of evidence that facts alone don't necessarily change people's minds. You need to get to people's emotions as well; you need to resonate with them to really change stuff. That's probably the main reason I moved over into the arts.”

The theme for this year’s TOA is Real Utopias. “The idea for the theme came from the fact that we’re in quite a bleak place politically for lots of different reasons,” explains Hamada. “And many people feel hopeless and unable to take action. So we wanted to have a theme that could galvanise people, make them feel that action was possible, and bring them together so it's easier to take action.” She says, though, that there’s a big emphasis on the “real’ part. “We wanted our ideas [of a Real Utopia] to be a bit pragmatic and show seeds of things that are already happening, rather than stuff that is too perfect or pie in the sky. So it’s a bit messy, but it's also real.”

One film that fits neatly into this theme is Power Station, a vivid portrait of community following the filmmakers Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn as they try and convince their neighbours to turn their street in Walthamstow into an energy-generating powerhouse via the power of the sun. “I think it fits Real Utopias really nicely,” says Hamada. “The artist/activists that the film is centred around admit they don't know everything; they get frustrated, make mistakes. So I think there's something quite nice about the way it portrays how it's OK to not necessarily know what you're doing all the time, and to hit dead ends and then have to rethink rather than having a really clean narrative.”

Another highlight looks to be Union, Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s documentary focused on a group of workers at an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey as they band together to form a labour union – the first in that online store’s history. Hamada calls it a classic TOA film. “It’s just such a powerful account of how workplace and community organising can change things,” she says. The screening will include a discussion with representatives from an Amazon fulfilment centre in Coventry who were recently unsuccessful in their attempts to unionise. “It’ll be really interesting relating this US example in New Jersey to the Coventry example and asking why it wasn't able to happen here in the UK.”

Other highlights look to be NIÑXS, which takes us to a small Mexican town where we follow teenager Karla over several years as she works through the complexities, joys and uncertainties of coming-of-age as a transgender person, and the classic 1984 documentary Red Skirts on Clydeside, which uncovers the untold story of the women activists who were central to the 1915 Glasgow Rent Strikes. As well as entertain and inform, Hamada hopes the programme will help shift people's mindsets and maybe even activate them into taking actions they might not have taken before. “The dream is to galvanise people through possibility and hope, rather than despair.”

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Take One Action!, Filmhouse, Edinburgh, 17-21 Sep; GMAC, Glasgow, 25-28 Sep; Eden Court, Inverness, 10-12 Oct; DAC, Dundee Libraries’ and Steps Theatre, 7-8 Nov
Full programme at takeoneaction.org.uk