A Short Success

I meet Catriona the day after the BAFTA Scotland New Talent Awards where her short film I’m in Away From Here was nominated in the Best Fiction category. She is looking very fresh-faced despite saying she feels quite the opposite. A graduate of RSAMD and more recently the Screen Academy in Edinburgh, Catriona’s background was originally in theatre and performance before she moved into writing and directing.

I’m in Away from Here, her graduation piece from the MFA in Film Practice, is a snapshot of a few hours in the life of a young man, Archie, who has Asperger’s Syndrome. The film was inspired both by her own experiences of having a brother with a language disorder and related autistic behaviours and also by an incident she saw one morning in the street.

“The lightbulb moment was when I saw a couple of guys coming along a street when I was waiting for a bus to go to work. They were two friends - one had a really pronounced limp and the other looked like this typical Ben-the-Boffin type character with thick curtains and big glasses - they were marching down the street with such confidence. There was just something different about them, in a good way. That really inspired me and when I came back from work that day I just wrote reams and reams about these two guys and what I thought their background was and what their friendship was like.”

With its free-moving, naturalistic style there are many parts of the film which resemble a documentary – a conscious choice by Catriona who was influenced in particular by The Dardenne Brothers’ L’Enfant and also the American independent film-maker Kelly Reichardt (who we interviewed in March’s issue) both of whom adopt a similar style. Catriona is very modest about the success of I’m in Away from Here which was chosen to be part of the official selection at Venice, one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals.

“I do feel that it’s a bit flukey because it’s just one person at the end of the day who it comes down to - the chief programmer. So there is a feeling that I’ve got to just take this opportunity and really use it the best I can but still feel humble at the same time because you know that it could have been another film.” Yet to her credit the film is a confident and sensitive work, and deservedly it was chosen not only for Venice but also for the Glasgow Film Festival, and selected from a huge number of entries for the BAFTA New Talent Awards. And this month the film will be travelling even further afield, this time to the US where it will be screening at Nashville Film Festival.