An in-depth screening, panel and networking session showcasing outstanding international short films from Birds Eye View's London opening night programme, plus The Magic Lantern's selection of the potted history of Scottish Women filmmakers. Includes a top-notch panel of women in the Scottish film industry, plus an opportunity for aspiring filmmakers to network and clink glasses with the experts following the screening/panel.
The Magic Lantern are delighted to join forces with Bird's Eye View to present a selection of the very finest short films by Scottish female filmmakers. The programme will contain archive treasures alongside more recent award-winning shorts and work from emerging talent, exploring the rich breadth and diversity of filmmaking by Scotland's female directors and artists over the years.
Please join filmmakers Mandy McIntosh and Ruth Paxton alongside BBC writer/ director Eleanor Yule and Birds Eye View Director Rachel Millward for an illuminating discussion on the evolution of Scottish female directors, and the issues faced by women working in the screen industry in Scotland today.
The Showcase will conclude with an exclusive screening of the opening night shorts programme from Birds Eye View’s sell-out 2008 festival at London’s BFI. Featuring emerging international talent, this is a fantastic taster of the extraordinary range of women filmmakers working today.
Please join us in the bar afterwards to meet the filmmakers and quiz the experts!
They Also Serve, dir. Ruby Grierson, 1940, 10 mins
They Also Serve, a home front propaganda film, focuses on the importance to the war effort of the everyday work of the British housewife. Ruby Grierson was the sister of the seminal documentary filmmaker John Grierson. Tragically, this was to be Grierson's final film. While making a film about the evacuation of children to Canada in 1940, the liner she was travelling on was torpedoed and Grierson was killed. Her humanity for her subjects and enthusiasm for the pure documentary style was a great loss to the documentary movement.
Ruby Grierson was the sister of John Grierson. She trained as a teacher before making several documentary films, of which this was the last completed due to her untimely death.
Hugh MacDiarmid A Portrait, dir. Margaret Tait, 1964, 8 mins
The poet Hugh MacDiarmid was well known for his championing of verse in Lallans, the dialect of the Scottish Lowlands. Margaret Tait shared his appreciation of the sound of language, and three of his poems give her charming informal portrait its structure.
Tait was one of Britain's most unique and individual artist filmmakers. Over the course of forty-six years she produced over thirty films and published five books of poetry and short stories, while living between the Island of Orkney and Edinburgh.
Donkey Skin, dir. Mandy McIntosh, 1996, 10 mins
Donkey Skin was made in County Galway, Ireland, an experimental film
work which subjectively explored the symbolism in traditional Arran
knitting. The work features Maeve O'Regan who had been an extra in The
Quiet Man as a child. She features in the film as a bed bound woman,
covered in a bland blanket made of cheap white bread. In her dreams she
finds her way home hrough a map of knitting. Donkey Skin was McIntosh's
first moving image work and the film was screened at the Madrid
International Women's Film Festval that same year.
Mandy McIntosh is a Glasgow based artist filmmaker who has been
making moving image work since 1996. Her films were originally informed
by the processes of knitting and joining fabrics and her work maintains
elements of bricolage. She often uses found objects/images and combines
odd textures, 3D animation with charcoal drawings. Most recently, her
work has been concerned with aesthetic decision making in the synthetic
representation of reality. McIntosh's work has been screened and
broadcast locally and internationally. In 2004 her collaborative work,
Weightless Animals was awarded a BAFTA. She is currently working on a
new animated version of Animal Farm with drawings made by primates and
elephants and has recently been commissioned by Picture This in Bristol
to make a moving image work in response to 'The Georgian House'.
Gasman, dir. Lynne Ramsay, 1997, 14 mins
A story of two children who react with naively simple emotion to a situation imposed upon them by their father's secret.
Born in Glasgow on 5 December 1969, Lynne Ramsay was educated at Napier College in Edinburgh, where she studied photography. From there she went to the National Film and Television School, specialising in cinematography and direction. Her graduation film, Small Deaths, won the Prix du Jury at Cannes in 1996, and her other short films Kill the Day and Gasman (both 1997) also garnered numerous awards. Hailed as one of the brightest new talents of British cinema, in a short directorial career Ramsay has already produced a promising and distinctive body of work. Ramsay’s features include Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar.
Home, dir. Morag McKinnon, 1999, 11 mins
Morag Mckinnon's Home is the tale of a council employed inspector visiting three houses within the film's strange and unhinged world. Funny and ethereal, the camera transforms the mundane into twisted visuals, a rubbish strewn council flat, looks like a gothic castle and the film spirals to an ending straight out of Lynch.
Born in Singapore, Morag grew up on the east coast of Scotland. She studied sculpture then Film and TV before turning her hand to directing. In 1998, she made 'Home', a short film for the Short and Curlies strand for Channel 4. The film was received well and went on to win a BAFTA and 15 international awards. "I became a director by accident, in the sense that I didn't really believe that I could end up being one, but after my first experience directing I was hooked and couldn't stop wanting to do it."
McKinnon is currently in production on her first feature, Rounding Up Donkeys, the second chapter in Advanced Party, a film trilogy which began with Andrea Arnold's Red Road.
She Wanted To Be Burnt, dir. Ruth Paxton, 2007, 10 mins
A woman wakes up, into reality, a nightmare, a memory?
Terrified at what she may have done, she runs. Paxton has made a disturbing journey into her own recurring nightmares. The film depicts the shredding of a conscience experienced at an intensity that is beyond words.
Ruth Paxton is an impassioned young Edinburgh filmmaker and artist who recently graduated from a Post-Graduate diploma in Film at Edinburgh College of Art. For six years she has focused on writing, directing, producing and designing for an eclectic mix of projects; encompassing fiction, non-fiction, experimental and music video. Paxton’s films are bold and powerful and she has a unique way of visualising, stylising and capturing the intimacy and complexity of deeply human tales.
