World's first folk film festival returns with focus on Ukraine

Launched in 2015, the FFG is the brainchild of Jamie Chambers, a lecturer in film at Edinburgh University. Curated by Scottish arts collective Transgressive North, co-founded by Mr Chambers in 2011, FFG aims to explore the relationship between cinema and other traditional arts, such as oral storytelling and folk songs.

In a statement with his co-producer, Edinburgh-based artist and curator Lydia Beilby, Mr Chambers said: “Folk film is film that focuses upon community, place and people, and this year’s packed programme sets into motion a dialogue of solidarity between Ukraine and Scotland, which draws connections across the rich cinematic heritage of both countries.”

The centrepiece event is a screening of silent film Arsenal, a seminal work of Soviet avant-garde filmmaking shot in Odessa in 1928 by the Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko.

A contemporary of Battleship Potemkin director Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, whose iconic Man With A Movie Camera was shot in Odessa a year after Arsenal, Dovzchenko is best known for his so-called Ukraine Trilogy.

Arsenal is the second film in the series. It concerns an episode which occurred a decade earlier during the Russian Civil War, when pro-Bolshevik workers at a Kyiv munitions factory took up arms in support of the advancing Red Army – ironically an act which put them in conflict with the nascent Ukrainian separatist movement.

Arsenal will screen at the capital’s Cameo Cinema and will be accompanied by the world premiere of a newly composed soundtrack by Dalhous, the solo project of Edinburgh-based electronic music producer Marc Dall.

A scene from Alexander Dovzhenko's 1929 film Arsenal (Image: Folk Film Gathering)

A scene from Alexander Dovzhenko's 1929 film Arsenal (Image: Folk Film Gathering)

Continuing the Ukrainian theme is a screening of Mykola Rasheev’s 1990 film Amulet, an absurdist social-realist comedy in which two brothers move to Kyiv from their home village and suffer very different outcomes.

The film is based on the work of Ukrainian author and journalist Volodymyr Drozd and a key scene was filmed at an independence rally in Kyiv in 1990 during the so-called Revolution On Granite, a student-led campaign centred on Independence Square.  

A scene from Mykola Rasheev’s 1990 absurdist comedy Amulet (Image: Folk Film Gathering)

The festival will also screen Natalia Matuzko’s 1995 film Voice Of Grass, and Pamfir, a 2022 drama directed by Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk.

The first is a version of a Ukrainian folk tale about a sorceress and her young apprentice but told from a feminist perspective. The second, which is only general release in the UK from Friday, tells the story of a man who returns to his home village in the Carpathian Mountains, which border Romania, and picks up his old profession of water diviner. Part crime drama, part folk-horror, it was described by film critic Peter Bradshaw as “one of the strangest and fiercest I have seen in a while … The film has a throb of something disturbing and transgressive.”

All three of these films will be introduced by live music from Ukrainian musicians, including singer Elzara Batalova who fled Crimea in 2014 and since 2022 has been based in the Borders.  

The subject of the paranormal and the spiritual in Scotland’s island communities is covered in Alison McAlpine’s 2008 “nonfiction ghost story” Second Sight, and in The Two Sights, directed by Canadian artist and filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta.

Released in 2020 but “collected” in the Outer Hebrides between 2017 and 2019, it juxtaposes images of land- and seascapes with an aural collage of stories and recollections in English and Gaelic.

McAlpine’s film, meanwhile, follows 80-year-old preacher Donald Angus MacLean as he visits Skye, talks about ghosts and reveals his poetic musings on life, love and death.

Both films will be introduced by Hebridean songs and stories from Margaret Bennett, Alastair McIntosh and Martin McIntyre.

Dipping into the archive of the BBC’s venerable Play For Today strand, which ran between 1970 and 1984 and gave early breaks to directors such as Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears, Mike Newell and Alan Clarke, FFG have also uncovered three rarely seen Scottish productions.

They are Orkney, from 1971, an adaptation by Tom McGrath of three stories by George Mackay Brown; 1979’s The Ploughman’s Share, with a script by poet Douglas Dunn; and The Bevellers, screened in 1974, a day in the life of a glass grinder in a Glasgow workshop.

A still from 1971 Play For Today drama Orkney (Image: Folk Film Gathering)

Elsewhere artist Luke Fowler has filmed a tribute to Orcadian filmmaker Margaret Tait, to be screened accompanied by appropriately experimental suite of live music from Bell Lungs and fellow Orcadian Sarah McFadyen, while Newcastle’s Amber Collective offers up What Happened Here, a tribute to the women of the 1980s miners’ strike.

Finally, the capital’s North Edinburgh Arts will host Granton Voices, an afternoon of films made by the children of Granton Primary School They delve into subjects as varied as racism, immigration, homophobia – and what happens when you’re late for school because you’ve slept in.

The Folk Film Gathering opens on June 12 and runs until June 29, with most events centred on the Cameo Cinema, Scottish Storytelling Centre and North Edinburgh Arts.