Scotland on Screen: A Year in Scottish Film

We’re not used to cinematic masterpieces emerging from Scotland in successive years but that’s exactly what’s happened. In 2021 we had Limbo, Ben Sharrock’s extraordinary tragicomedy about a Syrian refugee trapped on a remote Scottish island and facing the absurdity of the British immigration system. Hot on its heels, a similarly world-class feature arrived in the form of Charlotte Wells’ beautiful and achingly sad Aftersun. Paul Mescal and young Frankie Corio both give fine-grained and lived-in performances as a father and daughter going through a life-altering few days on a low-rent package holiday in Turkey, but it’s Wells’ confident filmmaking that really astounds. The characters’ inner turmoils are never spelt out in the dialogue, with Wells trusting her performers and her images to express the film’s tsunami of emotions.

Wells' debut was the knockout opening film at the 75th Edinburgh International Film Festival. With the collapse of the CMI in October, for a moment there it looked like there might not be a 76th edition of this long-running event, but word is EIFF's Creative Director, Kristy Matheson, has been asked to come back and deliver a festival next August as planned. She’ll do well to find a more fitting film to kick off those proceedings.

Aftersun wasn’t the only home-grown work to go down a storm at a festival this year. The most entertaining screening of 2022 was surely Glasgow Film Festival’s British premiere of Jono McLeod's My Old School. It’s a funny and surprisingly moving documentary recounting the notorious tale of Bearsden Academy student Brandon Lee. If you were around in Scotland in the mid-90s, you’re sure to know some of what went on, but McLeod, who was in Lee’s class at school, gives us the inside scoop with the help of his and Lee’s former classmates. Its stranger-than-fiction story is even more bizarre and jaw-dropping when told by the people involved.

My Old School’s screening was closely followed for entertainment value by a trip to Hawick’s Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival and the world premiere of Notes From a Low Orbit, Mark Lyken’s poetic documentary about Hawick and its residents. The feature was commissioned by the festival and, certainly, a big part of its appeal was watching the film in the presence of many of the people who featured in it. But as well as being a love letter to a very specific place, Lyken’s film also works as a wry examination of the absurdity of small-town life and the skew-whiff communities that form within them. It is sure to delight audiences well beyond the Scottish Borders.

Notes From A Low Orbit

There were more Scottish gems to emerge from this year’s EIFF. We were bowled over by A Cat Called Dom, the first feature from Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson, long the most exciting filmmakers on Scotland's short film scene. It’s an ingenious documentary swirling with ideas, picking apart the creative process and its messy interactions with real life. The premise is that Anderson and Henderson are collaborating on a project when Anderson is blindsided by the news that his mother has cancer. Rather than spend time with her, however, Anderson buries himself in work but is being constantly reminded of his situation by a naive animated cat (the eponymous Dom) that mysteriously manifests on his Macbook. For all its smart-arse trickery and metatextual rug-pulling, A Cat Called Dom is a deeply moving film about a young man who loves his mum and has suddenly realised she’ll not be around forever.

A Cat Called Dom

We were moved by another piece of meta-filmmaking from EIFF: the disarmingly charming Winners, directed by Iranian filmmaker Hassan Nazer, who’s called Scotland home since coming here as an asylum seeker in 2000. The film centres on a movie-daft kid who lives in a rural village in Iran and somehow gets his hands on the 2016 Oscar for Best International Feature Film. It also turns out that the Fagin-like character who employs many of the local kids in town is a Silver Bear-winning actor and we’ll just let you guess who’s driving the taxi that picks up the kid when he journeys to Tehran. A love of Iranian New Wave cinema isn’t essential to appreciating the sunny charms and gorgeous visuals of Winners, but a working knowledge of the work of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi would certainly help you follow its trail of delicious Easter eggs. The film is a lark and a cineaste’s paean to his home nation, but in 2022 it doubles as a poignant act of solidarity with the filmmakers who’ve stayed in Iran and paid heavy prices for that.

Winners won the Audience Award at EIFF while A Cat Called Dom won the inaugural Powell and Pressburger Award. Not too shabby. Let’s hope the festival manages to return in 2023.

Five Great Scottish Shorts from 2022:
The Bayview (Daniel Cook)
Go Home (Razan Madhoon)
Maureen (Shiona McCubbin)
Earworm (Bryan M Ferguson)
Too Rough (Sean Lìonadh)