Beeban Kidron is the brilliantly-monikered British director who has made award-winning TV dramas, including Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and feature films including Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason.
She's also a documentary maker whose subjects have ranged from the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp to the New York sex industry. Her new doc, though, may be the most thought-provoking and disturbing of all.
In InRealLife, teenagers talk frankly about their addiction to the internet, from the 15 year-old who admits that his daily diet of pornography has ruined his chance of a normal "real life" relationship, to the bright young student who has let his academic career and future prospects slip away because he can't stop playing video games, and, chillingly, the teenage girl, who put herself in danger and allowed boys to sexually assault her, just so that they would return the smart phone which they had stolen from her.
The film goes beyond the specifics of a generation who have never known life without an online dimension, to explore how naive we may all be about our relationship with the internet. How many of us read every word of the Terms & Conditions in online agreements? Why do we blithely ignore the fact that our every online move is noted and stored away in virtual databanks by global companies? Why do we let the fluffy terminology - "clouds, likes, tweets" - lull us into thinking that the net is a lovely, free playground rather than a device that's using our data to make billionaires out of pretend hippies?
It's restricted us in other ways. When I was a teenager, in the pre-internet era when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I worked in Europe one summer, then went traveling. I may have sent my parents two postcards in four months; I certainly never 'phoned them - too expensive. I got up to high jinx, they no doubt fretted at times, but we all just got on with it. It's a situation that's unthinkable for most of us now, and makes me wonder which is more worrying - the fact that big business is monitoring us online, or that we're all constantly, neurotically, tagging our loved ones. I think I may open a chain of internet and mobile phone-free retreats. How to advertise them, though?
'InRealLife' opens in cinemas on the 20th of September.
How wonderful that the great Scottish artist, Allan Ramsay, lived in the 18th Century, and couldn't while away his time playing Grand Theft Auto, rather than honing his craft. An exhibition of his stunning portraits has just opened in Glasgow and runs into the New Year.
Marvel at his beautiful work and enjoy a who's who of the influential movers and shakers of the time. There are also books, pamphlets and other material demonstrating Ramsay's place in the cultural life of Edinburgh, London, Paris and Rome.
Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment is on at Glasgow University's Hunterian Art Gallery. Well worth a visit.
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