Film Screening: Dàn Fianais

Film Screening: Dàn Fianais
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This is a past event

Elphinstone Institute Ethnographic Film Series

Online via zoom

Free entry

https://zoom.us/j/4779958373?pwd=eGc0SlpNeEZ1RkVoZ0ovRkNKUHpQUT09

Meeting ID: 477 995 8373

Passcode: m7uJ3d

Dàn Fianais or Protest Poem is a film-portrait of Skye and Lochalsh and some of its inhabitants, recorded in 2020-21. Some of the contributors are young activists demanding an equitable solution to the rapid gentrification of their villages and townships; others are crofters, storytellers, archivists, musicians and academics. Collaged with vernacular music and song, the conversations within the film invite imaginative contemplation of possible futures for Skye and Lochalsh - moving away from leisure-industry narratives of unpeopled scenery, and paying particular attention to ways of being that have endured through generations, in intimate entanglement with the land and its ecological systems. As well as being a document of real people in a real place*, this commission is an invitation to talk about what could be learned from the more communal and interconnected forms of society that have not entirely faded from the North-West Highlands, and how the tools for better ways of living together may already be within reach.

*Iain Crichton Smith - 'Real People in a Real Place', (1982), alastairmcintosh.com/general/resources/1982-Iain-Crichton-Smith-Real-People-Real-Place.pdf

Andrew Black is an artist, born in 1990 in Leeds. His recent moving-image projects explore social and ecological narratives in specific places, drawing on methodologies such as oral history recording, speculative storytelling, and collage. Andrew served on the committee of Transmission Gallery in 2016 and 2017, and is the recipient of the 2021 Margaret Tait Award; his commission, entitled The Besom, will premiere in 2022. He has lived and worked in Glasgow since 2009.

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Elphinstone Institute