George Kerevan: Scotland desperately needs to make more movies locally

As a result, Scotland faces a potential cultural disaster. Edinburgh and Aberdeen could lose their only cinema venues dedicated to showing non-commercial movies, while the world’s oldest continuous film festival could disappear into the ether. This is a dire emergency!

First, I need to declare an interest. For many years through the 1980s and 1990s I was personally involved with both the International Film Festival and Filmhouse. I showed my first documentary film (on the Scottish involvement in the Spanish Civil War) at the 1996 Festival.

I was chair of Filmhouse for some years and served on the board of the (then) combined film and television festivals. We had financial difficulties during those times, too. The arts have never been funded adequately. Even now there remains a certain philistinism towards culture in Scotland, which is treated as a luxury rather than a social necessity.

But in the words of Rose Schneiderman, the American trade union activist and suffragist, we need bread, and roses too.

The cause of the collapse of the Centre for the Moving Image – the holding company for the festival, Filmhouse and a sister art house cinema in Aberdeen – is put down to a “perfect storm” of rising costs coupled with the fact audiences have not recovered since the pandemic. The centre’s energy costs are slated to jump by a massive £200,000 in the coming year while audience numbers are still half what they were before Covid. As a result, more than 100 employees are set to lose their jobs.

However, I think there may be a bit more involved. Let’s start with the Film Festival, the jewel in the crown. Founded in 1947 along with the International Music and Drama Festival, it is the world’s oldest continuous festival of film – beaten in longevity only by Venice, whose continuity was broken by the Second World War.

The EIFF was created by passionate movie enthusiasts and practitioners at a moment in history when Scotland had more cinemas per head of population than anywhere in Europe and at a point in time when Scotland was renowned globally for pioneering documentary cinema, led by geniuses such as John Grierson. Movies were in the Scottish lifeblood not just as entertainment or even art, but as a radical force for social change.

The early festivals in the late 1940s and through the 1950s were major international events, with world premieres and the gathering of important film directors and producers such as Orson Welles.

Of course, it was easier then because there were far fewer film festivals – today there are something like 5000 around the world. And Edinburgh had a clear run in the UK. The London Film Festival (showing this week) was not founded till 1957. For a time, the Edinburgh Film Festival was the place to be seen.

My point is that the Edinburgh Film Festival saw itself as an international showcase and movie debating chamber, not just another stop on the circuit. It can be again.

Of course, there were ups and downs. The EIFF lost direction for a time but was revived in the shadow of 1968 and the global youth rebellion by the quixotic genius of Murray Grigor and the passion of Linda Myles. As a result, the 1970s were a golden age for the Edinburgh Film Festival. It became a showcase for the new auteur cinema emerging in a Vietnam-radicalised America and it revived interest in documentary film-making. Above all, Grigor and Myles appreciated the new self-assertion of Scottish political identity, giving it an expression on the screen.

Sadly, and without being over critical or censorious, the EIFF has lost some of its radical vision in recent times, which I think has contributed to the audience malaise as much as the virus.

For a time, the festival was switched from August to June, which broke the link with the energetic madhouse that is the ensemble of festivals in Edinburgh in the late summer.

Also, the process of picking of movies to screen at the festival has become too bureaucratised, too safe. The EIFF was always at its best when defined by the vision of a movie iconoclast.

The potential loss of Filmhouse is another tragedy. Edinburgh is not lacking in movie screens but increasingly they are held captive by Hollywood teenage franchises, which are more violent visual rollercoasters than serious film culture. There are a few independent screens showing more intelligent films, but Filmhouse was central to the capital’s movie diversity. Again, without attaching blame or wishing anyone out of a job, I fear that the Centre for the Moving Image had allowed its current operation to become too bloated. In the 1980s and early 1990s, under the energetic Jim Hickey and Gay Cox, Filmhouse thrived on a skeleton staff and a shoestring budget – and still managed to do grow its audience and improve its venue.

I fear the current board has been too pre-occupied with pursuing the fantasy of building a new cinema complex than keeping the existing operation effective.

But there is still time to save the International Film Festival, Filmhouse and the Belmont in Aberdeen. An online petition has been launched to mobilise support but ultimately the operation needs fresh thinking and more cash.

If ever there was a role for Creative Scotland and its movie arm Screen Scotland now is the time. The loss of the EIFF in particular would send a terrible signal regarding Scotland’s commitment to movies and moviemaking. It simply can’t be allowed to happen.

It is also vital that the Scottish Culture Secretary, Angus Robertson, gets on the phone and bangs heads together. Angus, if you are reading this, you have the culture brief as well as the constitutional one. Culture is not an add-on, it’s your day job, too. And you are an Edinburgh MSP.

Scotland desperately needs to make more movies locally – movies about how we live now. And we need the cinemas in which to see them, cinemas such as Filmhouse.

According to the best data I can find, small countries such as Norway, Greece, Taiwan and even Romania produce an average of around 20-plus indigenous new movies a year.

True, in Scotland we have begun to attract more international productions and local studio facilities have proliferated in recent years. But we do not make anything like the volume of indigenous films as in other similar nations.

There is much huffing and puffing about public support for cinema and movie-making in Scotland but the substance is sometimes less than adequate.

There are many talented movie makers, actors and crew in Scotland but the process of public funding of film production is over-bureaucratic and definitely risk averse.

For instance, Screen Scotland executives are involved far too closely in individual script development than is necessary or within their artistic competence.

Yet Creative Scotland happily gave £1 million to Netflix to film in Scotland – money the US media giant hardly needed. I doubt if Netflix gave it script approval.