by Michael Pattison
Oor Ain Film Archive is Alchemy’s film preservation and screen heritage project celebrating Hawick and Scottish Borders communities on film. Chief among its achievements is the digital restoration of every Hawick Pictorial, an annual feature-length account of the year produced on 8mm and Super 8mm by local amateur cineaste club Hawick Film Group between 1965 and 1980. To mark its sixtieth anniversary, the 1966 Pictorial is presented here as a centrepiece of our project showcase – digitally scanned by R3store Studios in London and digitally cleaned, re-graded and restored by Alchemy.
Alongside the digital version of the 1966 Pictorial, audiences are invited to two drop-in workshop sessions facilitated by film artist, curator and educator Lydia Beilby, who will guide visitors through the hands-on process of editing and splicing a new 16mm print of the film – reworking a slice of Hawick heritage into a new ‘people’s cut’, the world premiere of which will take place in the same space on Sunday 3 May.
Launched in 2025 with a £140,000 grant from the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding, Oor Ain Film Archive also manifests during this year’s festival as what will be, from this moment on, a permanent online resource and mediatheque dedicated to films made by Hawick and Scottish Borders communities. The kiosks inside the exhibition, used year-round as part of Heritage Hub’s remit as a local research facility, are viewing stations dedicated to Oor Ain Film Archive’s initial titles.
These titles include digitally scanned versions of films made in the 1960s and donated to us from members of the community; a film produced in Hawick by the Central Office of Information to showcase the town’s textiles industry to Brazilian audiences as part of the long-running British magazine series This Week in Britain (1959–71); recent films produced by Alchemy in collaboration with our community partners – valuable snapshots of a time and place as much as any so-called period film; and the 2024 restoration of Sons of Heroes (1964), the historical epic made by founding members of Hawick Film Group whose restored version opened our festival two years ago.
The archive also includes new restorations of A Toothy Tale and The Gasman Cometh, two 1960s one-reel Hawick Film Group comedies about a nightmarish trip to the dentist and a successive pile-up of DIY disasters respectively: previously digitised through re-photography to digital video, complete with vignetting and flattened, faded colours, both are now viewable in resplendent digital form.
