Join us for the world premiere of Alex Hetherington’s The Disco – A Portrait of Simon Eilbeck, an experimental documentary about the founder of Scottish queer club night Hot Mess
Glasgow Short Film Festival is delighted to announce that the opening film for the festival’s 18th edition (March 19-23, 2025) is The Disco – A Portrait of Simon Eilbeck, the new film by Scottish experimental moving image artist Alex Hetherington. It is his first work for cinema.
The Disco | Book nowGlasgow Short Film Festival is delighted to announce that the opening film for the festival’s 18th edition (March 19-23, 2025) is The Disco – A Portrait of Simon Eilbeck, the new film by Scottish experimental moving image artist Alex Hetherington. It is his first work for cinema.
It feels at times that Hot Mess is the last queer-defined space of its kind in Scotland and represents a shift away, through technology, pandemic, gentrification and austerity, from physical attendance at social spaces and representation through community resilience. The film finds its roots in the histories of disco from Trans, Latino, Black, Drag and Queer activism and collectivism, often defined and shaped by working-class, or excluded community, experiences. The Disco considers tensions of encounter recorded at a time of precarity, austerity, deepening Trans and Queer phobia and violent international crisis but it also contains illuminations on the multitudes within d/Deaf lives and experience and considerations on radical forms of assembly through Queer dreaming, care, hapticality and joy.
The soundtrack features a new improvised composition by David Toop, extracts from an improvised chamber work by Henri Pousseur as well as archival field recordings by Luke Fowler. Catherine Street voices her own narration throughout the film.
Talking to GSFF, he describes the film as “less of a traditional film,” comprised instead of “poetical observations” of a club night which was once a personal haven to him during difficult times living in Scotland, as it continues to be for many. “When I had kind of lost faith in my own community… Hot Mess brought me back to life,” he says. On creating his unconventional portrait of Simon Eilbeck, he says: “I don’t like documentary films that enter someone’s life too far and try to glean out something that’s not my business… I told Simon that I wasn’t interested in his d/Deafness as such, but in his experience at the centre of the whirlpool; as this calm presence who fills the space but doesn’t necessarily experience it as we do.”
The screening will be accompanied by a live reading by Catherine Street, and followed by a conversation with Alex Hetherington, Simon Eilbeck and other contributors.
Click here for tickets and check back on February 19th for the full programme announcement.
