Scotland on Screen: Duncan Cowles' short films
Ahead of the world premiere of Duncan Cowles' debut feature film Silent Men at Sheffield Doc/Fest, we look back at three of his recent short films
At this month’s Sheffield Doc/Fest, Scottish documentarian Duncan Cowles will launch his debut feature, called Silent Men, into the world. Described as “part road trip, part coming-of-middle-age tale”, it sees Cowles explore the stigma around male mental health. Ahead of that world premiere, we thought we’d take the opportunity to talk to this prolific Edinburgh-based filmmaker about three films that went down at storm at festivals last year. Each is very different, but all three are laced with the same laconic humour and sharp observations that have made him a firm favourite on Scotland’s short filmmaking scene.
Sighscape
Sometimes a film’s logline need only be as long as its title. Think Snakes on a Plane, A Man Escaped or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Add Duncan Cowles' Sighscape to that pile. It’s 60 seconds of, well, sighscapes – i.e. Cowles letting out a succession of increasingly hangdog exhales and groans over gorgeous images of seascapes.
The ingeniously simple short emerged after a period of intense work making Scary Adult Things, Cowles' 2021 documentary series exploring millennial malaise. It was a funny, heartfelt show that had Cowles' brand of deadpan humour, meta-commentary and skew-whiff philosophy running through it, but it was also made for BBC Scotland, which meant it had to adhere to certain rules. “I'd had all these constraints while making the show,” Cowles explains. “Each episode had to be 28 minutes, had to have a certain element of signposting and that kind of thing, so I was desperate to do something that broke that formula.”
He was racking his brains for ideas, then one day while filming at the beach, while being particularly knackered by the thought of having to make a film, he had the Eureka moment. “I can't remember now if I registered the sigh while I was doing it, or if it was a sigh that was present in one of the shots when I was watching it back, but somehow the connection was made – sighscapes! – and I thought it could be funny.”
While on holiday at various seaside towns around the UK he started amassing a cache of them. “One was at Land's End, way down at the bottom of Cornwall; one of them’s from where Broadchurch was filmed; another’s from up in North Berwick, so it was a mixture of places.” Initially he planned to make individual sighscapes and just send them to friends for fun or put them out on social media, but he began to realise they could work together as a micro-short film. As ever with Cowles, the resulting film is somewhat absurd, but also a relatable expression of fatigue that we all feel from the grind of daily life – even when we have a gorgeous view to admire.
Outlets
Outlets, Cowles’ moving tribute to his late grandmother, is one of his finest achievements. It explores topics he’s covered before: the enduring struggle of being a filmmaker, male emotional inarticulacy, the loss of a family member. He was initially worried about retreading old ground, though. “I'd already made a film about my grandad dying [2020’s In the Company of Insects]. So when my granny died, I was like, 'I can't just make another film about a dead grandparent, because I'll just be that guy who makes films about his family members dying." Unfortunately for Cowles, though, with every other idea he came up with, no matter what it was, his gran just kept creeping into it.
In true Cowles style, this context – the struggle to create while processing grief – became the content. One day, staring at a list of ideas he’d come up with and quickly abandoned, the film’s structure formed in his mind. “It just came to me, seeing all these ideas written down. I thought, 'I could do them all in one film, and then make the film about resisting the process of making the film.’”
For about a month, he made a film each day about one of these abandoned ideas, providing a meta voiceover of why they weren’t working and confessing that he keeps thinking about his gran. “I think it was an accurate depiction of how I was feeling because that's a genuine representation, even though I was slightly recreating it and recording it after the fact, it was a sad process, and it was so therapeutic. Like, I would sit there editing it and cry. It's a strange way to process your grief, right? Other people might paint or whatever, but for me, this was my way to process it.”
It’s not just Cowles who shed tears over Outlets. I bawled my eyes out while watching it, and it seems like audiences have had similar reactions. Part of why it’s so affecting is you’re initially caught off guard by Cowles’ deadpan humour – so the emotion creep up on you.
“That journey feels accurate to what grief is like,” says Cowles. “When someone dies, you do crack jokes and try and make yourself and people around you feel better about it. But then underneath there's this sort of bubbling sadness that you need to let out, because, in my experience at least, if you don't let it go, it doesn't go away. It needs to be processed.”
Desire Lines
I’ve always loved the idea of desire lines. If you haven’t heard the specific term, you know what they are: those cheeky shortcuts off the officially designated pathways. I’d always thought they represented freedom: they’re paths that have been democratically voted on by people’s feet, not decided by urban planners or those nerds who put up signs that read ‘keep off the grass’. Cowles’ Desire Lines shines them in a less flattering light, however.
The film was shot on Arthur’s Seat, one of Cowles’ regular stomping grounds. He’s been wandering that Edinburgh hill for years but recently started to pay attention to its crisscrossing paths. Around the same time, an old Guardian article about desire lines appeared on his timeline.
“I don't know how these things happen, algorithms, they seem to know what you're thinking before you do,” says Cowles. “But it came up and I was like, 'Oh, these paths have got a name.' I hadn't realised that. So it just got me thinking.”
As well as expressions of people’s freedom to roam, Cowles started to see these paths in more sinister terms. “They show that people don't follow the path, they sort of do their own thing.” In the film, Cowles has a God’s eye view, looking down from Arthur’s Seat on people (and sometimes dogs) as they scurry across the hill’s mess of desire lines, which, from his vantage above, look more like scares on the landscape. In voiceover he asks, “If we’re taking shortcuts on this, what else are we taking shortcuts on?” Maybe they don’t represent freedom or democracy, but people being innately selfish. The film becomes a compelling musing of the tension we have in the modern world: order vs anarchy, free will vs collective responsibility, or methodically sorting your recycling or saying 'fuck it! What do a few stray yoghurt pots matter?'
Sighscape is available to watch online at duncancowles.com/sighscape; Outlets is available to watch at duncancowles.com/outlets; Desire Lines can be watched online from 5 Jun for World Environmental Day – duncancowles.com/desire-lines/; Silent Men has its world premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest on 13 & 14 Jun
Filmography (selected): Silent Men (2024), Outlets (2022), Desire Lines (2022), Sighscape (2022), In the Company of Insects (2020), Just Agree Then (2018, co-directed with Ross Hogg), Taking Stock (2017), Alexithymia (2016), Two Minutes of Silence with Bob (2016), Isabella (2015, co-directed with Ross Hogg), Directed by Tweedie (2014), The Lady with the Lamp (2012)