Cucalorus Film Festival

Resident Artist

Jul 2014 – Nov 2014

Since making the decision to go freelance in 2010, I had been so busy with HippFest and other production projects, I felt I needed to take a step back and look seriously at my work as A Kind of Seeing. The opportunity arose to apply to the Artist Residency Program at Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington, North Carolina which is run by a fellow EIFF alumni Dan Brawley. Regularly named by Moviemaker Magazine as one of the top 25 coolest film festivals in the US, I knew this program could offer me the space and freedom to explore my practice.

I got accepted and lived a packed two weeks on the Cucalorus campus of their microcinema Jengo’s Playhouse and Pink and Yolo Houses for residencies. Accompanied by the heat of the Deep South and the call of the cicadas, I was able to experiment with creative participation, exploring community pride, ownership and empowerment through local archive films I found. This led to me creating a special event for the 20th edition of Cucalorus in November 2014: To See Ourselves as Others See Us!

Here’s my artist statement for this event which was a wonderful, challenging and fulfilling experience that packed a local night club venue:

“My work explores the nostalgia that the shared experience of watching films and going to the movies triggers in us. I’m fascinated by the memories and myths created by onscreen re-presentations of places, people and events. My own national identity as a Scottish person is influenced by the rich detail of archive films found in the Scottish Screen Archive – I get homesick for a past I never lived. So how does this happen? How could nostalgia (a word which literally is a conjoining of “homecoming” and “pain” or “ache” in Greek) be evoked in an audience sitting together in a dark cinema open to the power of movies? Where else than at Cucalorus 20 to explore this phenomenon…”