Macrobert: Central Scotland Documentary Festival
Guest Curator
Aug 2017 – Dec 2021
In October 2015, I kicked off Made in My Toun, the first archive film tour I had created, in the Filmhouse space of Macrobert Arts Centre based in the University of Stirling. There had been very few events of this kind in larger venues like Macrobert outwith community group networks. It really demonstrated an openness to experimentation and a belief in curators like myself from the Film Programmer Grahame Reid and the team at Macrobert.
That relationship with Macrobert has facilitated opened up access for me to research in the John Grierson Archive held in the University’s Special Collections. Not many independent cinemas can offer that! Then I was honoured to be asked to create Stirling Kaleidoscope for Closing Night of the first Central Scotland Documentary Festival (CSDF). It was pretty special to be able to bring ‘home’ a programme of archive films of Stirling and the local area to a receptive full house of folk who could still tell you how much it cost to get into The Regal cinema in town of a Saturday night in the 1960s.
Grahame once again commissioned me for the Closing Night of second CSDF 2018 and I created The Bigger Picture Show - a new larger than life archive film show featuring some of the more extraordinary documentary films in our moving image archives in Scotland and beyond. Going with a subject close to my heart, I chose films that were made for the big screen, films that use the big screen to offer incredible perspectives on the world, and films that you just won’t see on smaller screens. From aerial acrobatics to phantom rides to the microscopic made large, I wanted to make The Bigger Picture Show a unique entertaining cinema experience taking a fresh look at archive film on the beautiful big screen of Macrobert’s Filmhouse.
And I was honoured to be asked for CSDF 2021 to bring back the sell-out archive film programme commissioned for the very first Central Scotland Documentary Festival in 2017. In honour of this year’s 50th anniversary of the Macrobert opening in 1971, I dug a little deeper into the archives for an updated look at how times have changed but also may not have changed at all… From 1930s Alloa cinema adverts to the 1972 student protest that split the campus, familiar local sights were reflected and refracted through a kaleidoscopic array of films and images preserved in the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive and the University of Stirling Archives.
IMAGE: SEAWARDS THE GREAT SHIPS held in NLS Moving Image Archive