This is a past event
Ethnographic Film Series
Join us for a free screening of The Dreaming Bog, an ecopoetic film on Climate Change told through the history and mythology of the peatbogs of Scotland and Finland. It explores human-kind’s punishment and preservation on these vulnerable landscapes, with a musical score by University of Aberdeen lecturer John de Simone. Followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker.
Full abstract:
The Dreaming Bog is an ecopoetic film on Climate Change told through the history and mythology of the Peatbogs of Northern Scotland and the Mires of Finland – an exploration of the punishment and preservation by human-kind on these vulnerable landscapes.
The film is based on the opening act of an epic new poem by Caithness Makar, George Gunn, 'Six Thousand Years of Sunlight’, voiced and woven into a dreamscape narrative; a sensory journey; an imagining – echoing memory, language, history and our relationship with mother nature’s silent nurturer: The Carbon Rich Peatbog. The Peatbog (Boglach in Gaelic) or Mire (Suo in Finnish) is not only a depository of Carbon it is a repository of human collective history and of memory; ecosystems and evolution. What are our dreams – portent or paradigm? Perhaps it’s time we let our human sunlight sing itself back into the Peat...
Robert Aitken is a filmmaker, writer, producer and musician who has been developing his own style of Screen Craft for over a decade. He started Poetic Film School to work predominately with rural Highland communities, delving into their unique people in a landscape culture and offer filmmaking from a more arts response. Robert specialises in communicating the lost, or often forgotten, stories of peoples and their plight over the years to present day. His films, writing and music asks questions of society, environment and our future as a species. His project work has garnered him as an illuminative educator. Robert was born and brought up in the far north Highlands of Scotland. He grew up in the small coastal village of Brora in the 1970s and 80s and was a native of Sutherland.
- Speaker
- Robert Aitken
- Hosted by
- Elphinstone Institute
- Venue
- MacRobert Building, MR051