Discourse around contemporary technologies more often than not tends to be split across two opposing camps: techno-optimists and a solutionist belief that tech can help overcome all big issues facing humanity and the planet, versus techno-sceptics, attuned to the inevitable corruption that capitalism, state and corporate control bring to any new tech development. While current…

WFH FTW!  Not really though, but while everyone in makeshift office set-ups at home, navigating family, flatmates and/or loneliness, will have had a hard time over the last year, it is nothing compared to the many who were forced to go into work in unsafe conditions due to the UK government’s failures and warped priorities,…

Fifty-three years since the commencement of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, Barbed Wire Love presents intimate tales from those who stayed, those who left and those who passed through. Sisters and brothers, those who danced at raves, those who had good intentions and those who did not. Chance encounters, intimate first-person cinema and the unreliability of history…

Goretti, Majella, Sinead and Dinky are four school friends living in the catholic ghettos of the Bogside and Creggan estates in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1984. At the age of 15 they are full of youthful exuberance and boys feature largely in their interests. When Goretti meets Ciarán at an Irish language class a romance…

Curated for Anim18 – a UK-wide celebration of British animation – by Ross Hogg, and marking the centenary of Orcadian filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait, this programme showcases Scottish animations that play with the form and structure of filmmaking. Story is not the driving force. Instead, we are treated to a series of visual delights where subtlety can…

Alice Jane McKinney | 2017 |  10 min (Selected by Scottish Queer International Film Festival) Polish immigrant Marta returns to visit her family after leaving for Scotland in search of a better life. On her childhood farm, a past life of taboo is uncovered as well as the heart-breaking sacrifice Marta made to find safety and…

Leonid Shmelkov | 2017 |  3 min Beware of pearfall! It happens suddenly, so it is necessary to be prepared. This film provides detailed instructions on how to behave in such cases. A surreal and funny short, suited to both family audiences and cult/late night screenings. Leonid Shmelkov was born in Moscow in 1982. He studied Graphic Arts…

Simon Bishopp | 2017 |  4 min A homeless woman seeks retribution after being displaced by the arrival of a future civilisation seeking refuge from global warming and war. A brief but powerful sci-fi meditation on migration, resistance and culpability, and a tour-de-force of homemade special effects. Simon Bishopp graduated from Springvale Training Centre in 1999, earning a Distinction…

Falconer Houston | 1977 |  7 min A recently rediscovered expressive short about a teacher at the end of his tether. Faced with yet another day teaching music to uninterested boys he decides to take the rest of the day off. Paisley artist Falconer Houston is well established as a painter and ceramicist, yet his many short films…

Duncan Cowles | 2017 |  4 min Using his failed attempts at creating profitable stock footage, a filmmaker reflects on the absurd, mundane and funny side of being trapped inside your own head as an out of work, self-employed freelancer. Duncan Cowles is a BAFTA Scotland award-winning documentary filmmaker whose short films The Lady with the Lamp, Soft Toffee,…