GLASGOW’S Kenmure Street community protest is to be celebrated as part of a film festival with a global outlook.
Grassroots activists will share their experience of their successful fight to stop a forced deportation to see what can be learned by other communities both in Scotland and internationally.
The recent protest is being celebrated as an example of solidarity, the theme of this year’s Folk Film Gathering which will again take an online format.
Director Jamie Chambers said while the ongoing reality of the pandemic was “grim”, moving online meant they had been able to bring together some of the most exciting film directors working in the world today.
The programme revolves around a series of live conversations between filmmakers from very different parts of the world, who nonetheless share certain aspects of perspective and approaches to filmmaking.
“Our programme this year has an incredible geographical reach right from the Canadian Arctic to Brazil and Burkino Faso,” said Chambers. “In an ordinary year the chances of us being able to bring directors like John Sayles and Zacharias Kunuk over to Scotland to take part in a modest event like ours are very small, but being online has opened up amazing opportunities to not only bring filmmakers to us but to each other as well.”
He added that bringing the filmmakers together provided a chance to explore the idea of a folk cinema.
“Doing it online this year with this degree of ambition allows us to really open that conversation up to some of the filmmakers that gave rise to our notion of a folk cinema in the first place – people John Sayles who make films about the labour movement, for example.”
The festival is structured around the conversations, with films by these filmmakers included so that audiences can watch their work and then attend the conversations where they will have the opportunity to ask questions.
As always, connections between cinema and music will be explored too, with the likes of the US’s Bonnie “Prince” Billy in conversation with Scotland’s Mairi Campbell.
The Kenmure Street panel discussion will be led by Bella Caledonia’s Iona Lee and Jim Monaghan and feature a panel including human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar, local activist and Kenmure resident Fatima Uygun and co-founder of the Glasgow Girls Roza Salih.
The films include Amussu, which was made collectively by Nadir Bouhmouch with the Imider community in southeast Morocco and chronicles a courageous act of community resistance when women, men and children came together to shut down the water pipeline to Africa’s biggest silver mine in order to stop it drying out their almond groves and destroying their oasis. Filmed eight years later, Amussu follows the villagers as they consider an ongoing resistance cobbled together from the few means at their disposal: songs, weekly assemblies, a flimsy camera, a film festival and endless ingenuity.
THE Amber Collective’s What Happened Here focuses on August 24, 1984, when 2000 policemen descended on a small colliery village in County Durham with the aim of getting one man across the picket line during the miners’ strike. The community of Easington thus found themselves under occupation. Thirty-five years later, the Amber Collective look back upon the events of 1984-85, focusing in particular on the efforts of a number of remarkable women to keep Easington fed during the miner’s strike. Using photography, archive footage and contemporary interviews with community members, Amber explores what happened through the eyes and words of the community itself, and what has happened to Easington since.
Sayles’s The Secret Of Roan Inish also features and is described as one of the great folk tales of world cinema. It tells the story of Fiona, a young girl who is sent to live with her grandparents in a small Irish fishing village in the 1940s. There she hears the story of her long-lost brother Jamie, who was stolen by the sea and now lives with the seals, which prompts her to delve into the secrets of the past.
Meanwhile, Kunuk’s Camera D’Or-winning debut feature is an epic narrative of a community confronting an ancient evil. It involves a hazardous chase across the Canadian arctic, leading to a climactic reckoning when the community must come together to face its past. Made collectively by Isuma TV with local communities in Igloolik, Atanarjuat is described as a powerful statement of Inuit vitality and dignity, and a visionary work of cinema.
For more information go to http://www.folkfilmgathering.com/
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