Small Islands Film Festival 2-3 October 2009

Small Islands Film Festival Celebrating Homecoming – ‘South and East’Islay 2-3 October 2009

To celebrate Scotland’s ‘Year of Homecoming’ the Small Islands Film Festival 2009 focuses on the theme of ‘home’ and homecoming’ in a packed programme of screenings and discussions of award-winning shorts, documentaries, drama-docs and rare archive films from the world’s island communities. Earlier in the year we explored our interpretation of ‘island homecoming’ from the perspective of ‘North and West’ with our third annual festival event that took place on the Isle of Benbecula, Western Isles, 19-21st June 2009. Now we wish to  continue with  our homecoming theme by returning to the island of Islay for our second contribution to this year’s 2009 Homecoming celebrations by staging a further festival event.  The Small Island Film Festival Trust offers this programme of events in association with the Faculty of Business and Creative Industries, and the Scottish Centre for Island Studies, University of the West of Scotland.

All screenings will take place at Ionad Chaluim Chille Ìle, Gart na Trà, Bogha Mòr, Eilean Ìle / Columba Centre, Bowmore, Islay. The main programme of screenings (Sessions A-D) will be complimented by additional Gaelic related film materials accessible at the Centre’s Library/Learning Resource Room (Session E).

Programme Schedule

Times

Screening Sessions

Running Times

Fri 2nd Oct

Programme maybe subject to change

Session A

1915-1930

Welcome & Opening Remarks

5 min

1930-2000

I Know Where I’m Going Revisited (1994)

30 min

2000-2130

I Know Where I’m Going (1945)

91 min

Sat. 3rd Oct

Session B

1000-1100

Black Man’s Houses (1992)

58 min

1115-1215

Being Rapanui (2007)

58 min

Session C

1630-1700

The Island Tapes (St Kilda + A New Way to A New World)

30 min

1700-1800

Act of War: The Overthrow of the Hawai'ian Nation (1993)

60 min

Session D

1930-2000

Home and Away (1974)

30 min

2000-2130

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1952)

90 min

2130-2145

Closing Remarks

15 min

Session E (Library room)

Archive Film Screenings (Gaelic/English/Subtitles)

Welcome

The Small Islands Film Trust (Urras Film nan Eileanan Beaga) welcome you to this our fourth Small Islands Film Festival. This year, as a contribution to Scotland’s Year of Homecoming, we return to Islay with a selection of films from Argyll, Scotland and the global world of islands in a programme designed to celebrate and commemorate the theme of ‘Home, Homecoming and Homeland’ in all its aspects.

Earlier in the year we returned to the Uists with a focus on ‘Homecoming - North and West’ with films from our own islands of the west and from Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Greenland and Nunavut, Canada.

For this Islay event the focus is on ‘Homecoming - South and East’ featuring films from Flinders Island, Tasmania, Rapanui (Easter Island) and Hawai’i along with films from the Hebrides, with a particular emphasis on Argyll and Bute. The programme closes with a commemorative celebration of the 1709-2009 tri-centenary rescue from self-imposed island exile of the Scottish buccaneer sailor, Alexander Selkirk, whose story was the real-life basis for the enduring story of loss of home, exile and island solitude before ultimate delivery and homecoming as The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Further details of all films can be found in this programme.

Acknowledgements

Small Islands Film Trust (Urras Film nan Eileanan Beaga) wish to thank the Scottish Centre for Island Studies and the Faculty of Business and Creative Industries, University of the West of Scotland, Argyll and Bute Council and Ionad Chaluim Chille Ìle for their financial and administrative support. The Trust would also like to thank Homecoming Scotland, the British Film Institute, BBC Scotland, Ronan Films, Santi Hitorangi and Susan Hitoshapiro, Te Pito Productions, Puhipau and Joan Lander, Na Maka o ka ‘Āìna, Film G and MG Alba, David Allison, Mike Alexander, Eileen Rae, the National Library of Scotland and a special thanks to Anne and Lorraine of Ionad Chaluim Chille Ìle.

Friday 1930-2000

I Know Where I’m Going Revisited

Country

Scotland

Island

Mull

Director

Mark Cousins

Running Time

30 min

Language

English

Date

1994

By way of introduction to our opening main feature, the Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's I Know Where I’m Going, the programme opens with Mark Cousin’s short documentary looks back at this 1945 classic to frame both its context and its significance. Interesting details about the making of the film are related by actresses Dame Wendy Hiller & Petula Clark and cinematographer Erwin Hiller. Renowned contemporary filmmaker Martin Scorsese also discusses why the movie is important to him.

Stitching the narrative together is New Yorker media critic Nancy Franklin, who explains why the film changed her life and takes the viewer for a fascinating look at the Argyll island of Mull to visit shooting locations and meet a couple of elderly islanders who were involved with the film's production. Mark Cousin’s revisiting of The Powell/Pressburger classic has been widely acclaimed as providing ‘a great insight and a different way off looking at the story’ one of the finest romantic films ever made.

Additional Material

Some additional information on the Argyll and Mull location to be found on the Scotland the Movie website at:

http://www.scotlandthemovie.com/movies/fknow.html and an interesting account of the 2005 60th anniversary celebration of I Know Where I’m Going at its Mull location, organised by Robert Beveridge of Napier University in Edinburgh with the assistance of Steve Crook of the Powell and Pressburger Appreciation Society at: http://www.court-eclipse.co.uk/IKWIG-2005/index.htm.

The work of the Society itself is to be found on: http://www.powell-pressburger.org/ and there is also a website entirely devoted to the film itself at: http://www.ikwig.co.uk/.

Friday 2000-2130

I Know Where I’m Going

Country

Scotland

Island

Mull

Directors

Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

Running Time

90 min

Language

English

Date

1945

A young middle-class Englishwoman Joan Webster is determined to have the finer things in life, and to that end she plans to marry Sir Robert Bellinger, a wealthy, middle-aged industrialist whom she does not love. En route to the Scottish Island of Kiloran (mythical), where her future husband has his West Highland sporting retreat, Joan is stranded on the nearby island of Mull.

Inclement weather keeps her grounded for a week, during which time she falls in love with young, insouciant naval officer Torquil McNeil. As the name indicates, the latter is a Highlander and also, it transpires, a proud but penniless island laird.

Ignoring the dictates of her heart and the gathering dangers in the island weather, Joan determinedly insists on heading out to sea for her arranged destination and marriage of convenience, on the island of Kiloran. Against the beauty and the dramatic settings of Argyll’s Atlantic islands, the final outcome of this saga, her journey and romantic encounter is not hard to predict.

“It is, quite simply, a film to fall in love with.”

Tom Gunning

Saturday 1000 – 1100

Black Man’s Houses

Country

Australia

Island

Flinders Island, Tasmania

Director

Steve Thomas

Running Time

58.00

Language

English and Aboriginal (with English sub-titles)

Date

1992

A fine walled enclosure and trim grass lawn surrounds the imposing mausoleum that marks the homecoming to his native land and amongst his own native people of Major-General Lachlan MacQuarie of the island of Ulva (1762-1824). A plaque commemorates the career of the former Governor of New South Wales who, as a scion of the Macquaries of Ulva and the MacLaines of Lochbuie, Mull lies buried amongst his own people in his own native island. The National Trust of Australia maintain the personal burial ground of man from Ulva and Mull known as the ‘father of Australia’.

Off the coast of Tasmania, the former colony of Van Diemen’s Land, where the names of Lachlan MacQuarie, his 2nd wife Elizabeth Campbell of Airds (Appin) and their native Argyll are imprinted everywhere on the landscape, in Flinders Island, Australia's first segregated Aboriginal Reserve, there is a very different burial ground of indigenous people in a remote corner of their native land that tells a very different story.

The neglected burial site at Wybalenna, ('Black Man's Houses'), the principal settlement on Flinders Island is now a battleground dividing a community This documentary tells the story of black survival in Tasmania amidst the continuing suppression of history and culture as, more than a hundred years after the Tasmanian Aborigines were declared extinct, their descendants set out to reclaim the lost graves of their ancestors on Flinders Island in Bass Strait.

The genocidal decimation of Tasmanian’s indigenous population, towards whom MacQuarie’s policies can only be described at best as ‘ambivalent’ provides a grim background. Yet, the story of the present campaign is deeply uplifting in a post-colonial world which has underestimated the ability of Indigenous cultures to evolve, to adapt and to incorporate their conquerors:

"This film is an open-hearted and deeply moving story of what makes us black."

Greg Lehman, Riawunna Centre for Aboriginal Education, Tasmania.

"In a period when national and racial identity problems are in the forefront of world developments, this film has much to tell us about the survival of cultural identity in the face of generations of adversity."

Prof. Henry Reynolds, historian & author.

WINNER! BEST AUSTRALIAN FILM – Melbourne Film Festival.

Saturday 1115 – 1215

Being Rapanui

Country

Chile

Island

Rapanui (’Easter Isand’)

Director

Susan & Santi Hitorangi

Running Time

54.00

Language

English, Spanish and Rapanui (with English sub-titles)

Date

2007

Rapanui, or ‘Easter Island’ is another island community in which Scottish complicity in colonial exploitation led to the denial of home and homecoming to yet another indigenous island people. This documentary tells this story from the perspective of the Rapanui people, the native people of the island that ranks as one of the most remote inhabited islands on earth.

Rapanui, 2300 kilometers from Chile and 3800 kilometers from Tahiti is famous for the nearly 1000 monumental, monolithic statuts, the Moai, one of the most enigmatic mysteries on the cultural landscapes of the world’s islands. Against this backdrop of magnificent petroglyphs carved into the bedrock and filmed against stunning skies and endless oceans,this documentary draws on olde surviving island oral histories and more recent documentary sourcesto tell the Rapanui story.

A pivotal moment occurred in 1888, when, after 2000 years of self-sufficiency, the Chilean Navy annexed the island through an alleged ‘Treaty’ that was written on bifurcated paper, in Spanish and transliterated Rapanui; both sides having distinctly different meanings.

The island and people were leased to a Scottish-owned Chilean sheep-farming company, Williamson-Balfour. Through their subsidiary, the Compania Explotadora de la Isla de Pascua (CEDIP), Williamson-Balfour ran Rapanui island as a vast sheep-farm. The Rapanui people were forced off their lands and fenced into Hanga Rua, the only town which they could not leave without written permission. In the opening decades of the 20th century there were only 250 Rapanui indigenous people confined to the town, the rest of the island being set aside for over 250,000 sheep that destroyed the topsoil, the native flora and many archeological sites.

Despite the missionaries forcibly converted the people and the loss of Rongo-rongo, the native hieroglyphic writings, when the last king was poisoned, indigenous Rapanui culture has tenaciously survived. Today the Rapanui culture, language and people see their homeland and culture as vibrant and flourishing, with a movement to reclaim and recultivate ancestral lands and regain self-sufficiency. UNSECO named Rapanui a 'patrimony to humanity'. The indigenous people’s name for their island is TE PITO OTE HENUA (“the navel of the world”). This outward and forward-looking film underlines how young Rapanui islanders see their island home as connecting them to the umbilical cord of the world.

Saturday 1630-1700

The Island Tapes (St Kilda – Britain’s Loneliest Isle; A New Way to A New World)

Country

Scotland

Island

St Kilda; Ellis Island

Director

Paul Robello and Bobby Mann; Peter Murray

Running Time

16 min; 15 min

Language

English and Gaelic

Date

2008 (1923; 1936)

The Island Tapes is the name of an imaginative project by David Allison and his music colleagues, Ian Melrose, Allan Neave and Alyth McCormack to set traditional songs, new songs and original musical compositions to the moving images of silent archival films of the Scottish islands from the national Scottish Screen Archives and perform the finished production as a live stage musical performance. The results, including filming of some of the group’s live performances is also available as the Island Tapes DVD.

This screening features two extracts from the full 90 min tapes. The first is the 1923 archive film, St Kilda – Britain’s Loneliest Isle and its accompanying music and song (16 min).

The second is the live performance of A New Way to A New World, featuring 1936 footage of transatlantic crossings from the Clyde to America, recorded live at the Dundee Guitar Festival.

‘In amongst all the other things you have to do in life, if you are lucky, you also get to dream a bit. The Island Tapes is one of those dreams, a rare and special chance to fuse music, film, journalism, history, and even a smattering of humour. There is also the continual surprise of how four very different people, each of them a soloist in his or her right, can come together in a curious marriage of moving images and sound, taking something very particular and unique to audiences around the world and somehow finding something universal.’ – David Allison.

Saturday 1700-1800Act of War: The Overthrow of the Hawai'ian Nation

Country

USA

Island

Hawaii

Director

Puhipau & Joan Lander

Running Time

58.00

Language

English

Date

1993

The Atlantic islands of Argyll and the islands of the South Pacific featured prominently in the life and work of Robert Louis Stevenson and his involvement in the anti-colonial struggles of the Pacific islanders left an enduring impact on the cultural legacy of the latter. When he arrived in Hawai'i in 1889, Stevenson formed a particularly close friendship with King David Kalakaua and the islands’ royal family through his fellow Scot, Archibald Cleghorn, a Honolulu merchant and government minister who was married to the king’s sister, Princess Likelike. Facing increasing undermining of their island sovereignty by powerful American interests, King Kalakaua sought unsuccessfully to establish a federation of Polynesian states that might resist foreign encroachment and the American pressure simply intensified.

Robert Louis Stevenson lent his full support to the Hawai'ian nation in their efforts to resist American domination and annexation as he was also later to do on Samoa, his final resting place, but vigorous native opposition was no match for American military might and political duplicity. (Image of R. L. Stevenson in Hawaii, courtesy of “The Trustees of the National Library of Scotland”.

Act of War takes its title from events in January 1893 when armed troops from the U.S.S. Boston landed at Honolulu in support of a treasonous coup d'etat against the constitutional sovereign of the Hawai’ian Kingdom, Queen Lili'uokalani. It marked the eventual annexation of Hawai'i by force that that U.S. President Cleveland acknowledged was nothing short of an international ‘act of war’.

Produced in association with the Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai’i, the documentary uses stylized re-enactments, archival photos and film, political cartoons, historic quotes and presentations by Hawai’ian scholars to tell Hawai’ian history through Hawaiian eyes.

Completed in 1993 it was first broadcast on Hawai'i Public Television during the centennial year of the overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani, a landmark year in the Hawaiian movement for sovereignty and independence. In that same year, the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution admitting the illegal taking of Hawai'i and formally apologizing to the Hawaiian people. President Clinton signed the resolution in November of 1993.

Saturday 1930 – 2000Home and Away

Country

Scotland

Island

Director

Mike Alexander

Running Time

30 min

Language

English

Date

1974

The script for Mike Alexander’s early short, Home and Away, was co-written by Mike Alexander and Bill Douglas.

The recent inclusion as a welcome extra on the long-awaited DVD release of Bill Douglas’ highly-acclaimed epic Comrades, which sadly was to be his last film, highlights Home and Away’s merit as reflecting ‘some of the highly subjective nature of Douglas’s own films’. In this context it is ‘the story of James, a young Scottish boy at boarding school who is struggling to come to terms with his parent’s marriage breakdown, his own insecurity and his new schoolmates.’

Closer to home, from a specifically Scottish perspective, the story’s interest also lies in its distinctive island setting, of leaving on the island ferry for secondary education in a setting in which the classroom, the hostel or the lodgings, the teaching staff and the hostel staff, classmates and fellow hostellers/ lodgers are all inextricably linked in a new world away from home. In this sense Home and Away highlights Alexander’s continuing interest in island themes in his own later films.

Saturday 10:00 – 20:00

A selection of Scottish island based shorts including:

Guthan nan Eilean (Island Voices) Life in the Uists

A Taste of Uist

Ionad Chreag Àrd (Craigard) (Engl. transcript)

MG Alba/ Film G Award Winning Gaelic Shorts 2008

· Beatha a bhaird (dir: Seonag Anderson)

· Dhachaigh (dir: Sgoil Lionacleit)

· Dùsgadh (dir: Àrd Sgoil Bàgh a Chaisteal)

· Oidhche Shaithairne (dir: Seonaid NicDhomhnaill) (Engl. s/t)

· Suas air cnoc-fhaire (dir: Caty MacLennan)

· Siubhlachan (dir: Uisdean Murray) (Engl. s/t)

Saturday 2000 – 2130

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Country

Chile

Island

(Isla Más a Tierra/ Robinson Crusoe Island)

Director

Luis Buňuel

Running Time

90 min

Language

English

Date

1952

Two hundred years ago, in 1709, the buccaneer sailor Alexander Selkirk, from Largo in Fife, was rescued from a remote, uninhabited Pacific island off the coast of Chile. When an account of his almost five years of self-imposed solitary exile was published in 1712 the story captured the imagination of poets and writers. In 1719 with a new identity as an Englishman, a new place of island exile in the Caribbean and a new fictional account of his life of solitude, the story of the adventures of the island exile ‘Robinson Crusoe’ was published in London by Daniel Defoe. Since then the story of Robinson Crusoe has assumed global status in the arts, literature and film.

One of the most intriguing film representations of the story is that of the celebrated surrealist master, Luis Buñuel. Shot in Mexico during the director's long self-imposed exile there, with ‘Don Luis’ as both screenwriter and director, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe contains quite a few Buñuel touches.

The story had long appealed to Buñuel and, not surprisingly, in the latter’s hands the result is a film that it much more involved than a straightforward adaptation of a literary adventure story, a valorization of Protestant English or Christian European values, or of a symbolic exploration of loneliness and culture clash.

Whereas Defoe’s Crusoe is a vehicle to assert the virtues of religion, Western civilization and the civilizing mission of English and European colonialism, through Buñuel’s prism Crusoe’s confidence in the latter is seen to waver as Buñuel deftly subverts all these proclaimed certainties.

For those familiar with his more celebrated masterpieces and the distinctiveness of his style, the Buñuel touch is evident throughout the film. As a screenwriter it is perhaps most noticeably apparent in the scenes involving Crusoe and his new companion, Friday whilst as a director it is most obviously present in the more challenging surreal sequences. Made in 1952 and based on an adaptation of a two hundred year old true life tale of a Scottish adventurer it remains aptly relevant to our contemporary world.