by Michael Pattison
The films in this programme were made as part of Outwith, Alchemy Film & Arts’ 2021-22 community filmmaking and skills development programme for young people in the Scottish Borders. Other Outwith films are viewable in the exhibitions programme of this year’s festival: see our Film Town showcase and Start Making Sense.
Guided by Alchemy’s Film Town Coordinator Tom Swift, the 11 young artists here get out and about as a creative means of collecting images and sounds. Together, they capture some of the joys and frustrations, the opportunities and uncertainties, the absurdities and intensities of existing in Scotland’s rural south.
In Sunny!!, keen illustrator Eden Walter-Leeming embraces the moving image by keeping things incredibly still, asking if you can tell a story through a hat – and what, by extension, an audience might imagine that story to be. Angus Walter-Leeming’s One Hundred Gold Coins is equally ambiguous: a single-take snapshot of money falling into frame, piquing at least one curious creature’s interest.
In Ben Ramsay’s evocatively eccentric Brain-Child, an artist runs into bother with creativity itself, when his great idea objects to being birthed – and takes him aggressively to task for the trouble. Similar modes of consciousness are expanded in Snow, in which Chris McCall poignantly animates an unintentionally murderous robot’s upward scramble from a mine in pursuit of an elusive winter bliss.
In Artificial Dreams, Angus Bradley brilliantly explores notional and literal landscapes through machine learning and generative A.I., creating a world abuzz with algorithmic possibilities. By contrast, Esmé Babineaux’s haunting, haiku-like maybe i will lie here seeks refuge in less outlandish environments – until these also begin to dissolve, perhaps through the power of dream, into liquid.
River N. Uhing contributes the first entry in Along the Waters, his series of documentary portraits of Hawick and its people. Focusing with monochromic warmth on local musician Seán Dowd, Uhing adapts his stunning street photography to accrue a deeply affecting moving-image work that taps into Hawick’s rhythms.
In Cold Comfort, Seb Lord ventures to Edinburgh to gather – and manufacture – scenes of urban isolation, carefully framing an individual subject in wintry compositions teeming with city life. In stark contrast, Amelie Berry’s Everyday Everted sculpts mental confusion and an ominous sense of dread from a seemingly abandoned country house: alarm isn’t caused by the figure in the window, here, but by the one in the field outside.
Hannah Dodd’s meditative As Within, So Without plays with similar notions of exteriority and interiority, focusing on a superbly surreal image of a domestic gate opening out onto a becalming lake. Closing the programme, with formal brilliance, is expertly layered Mind Full, Lewis Teckkam’s maximalist monologue of intrusive thoughts, frames within frames, and an angry, television-bound onion.
