To See Ourselves

Alex Norton discovers how showbusiness has handled the portrayal of the Scottish accent. For over 100 years audiences have struggled to understand our braw brogue: silent Harry Lauder films attempted an accent in the captions, and in Hollywood's golden era , everyone wanted to paint their tonsils tartan- but as examples from Katharine Hepburn, Orson Welles and Richard Chamberlain show, they couldnae. Then Disney made Brave and proved that it disnae have to be all bad!

Ewan McGregor narrates a captivating portrait of wild Shetland and traces the course of a breeding season as the animals on these remote islands battle for survival.

The rivalry between football clubs Rangers and Celtic goes past typical name calling and dives into violence, racial slurs and pure hatred. The rivalry between Glasgow's "Old Firm" sides is the most famous in world football. It's the game's flagship loathing, proof of the power of the sport to inspire profound levels of tribal loyalty and a near-Pavlovian revulsion at anything to do with a rival. We examine the situation and try to get a handle on the political, religious, and national identity clashes that have shaped the rivalry, speak to fanzine editors on both sides of the divide and travel with the Bhoys' away support to a match at Tannadice.

Robotic historians recount and examine the events leading up to the annihilation of humanity.

The story of the first ascent of Rhapsody at Dumbarton Rock, the world's first E11 and hardest traditional rock climb. Huge falls, injuries, tears and eventually success!

Celebrating Billy Connolly's 75th birthday and 50 years in the business, three Scottish artists - John Byrne, Jack Vettriano and Rachel MacLean - each create a new portrait of the Big Yin. As he sits with each artist, Billy talks about his remarkable life and career which has taken him from musician and pioneering stand-up to Hollywood star and national treasure.

Actor Mark Bonnar is on a mission to understand more about the Scottish new towns in which he grew up, exploring the street sculpture made by artists such as his dad in the 60s, 70s and 80s. He discovers why the new towns are there and how they enticed people out of the bigger cities, and uncovers the surprising ways in which public art changed the new towns and the new towns changed public art. Mark's father, Stan, made sculptures that stand to this day on the streets of Glenrothes, East Kilbride and the Scottish new town that never was, Stonehouse. These new towns employed town artists to make artworks in the very housing precincts the new residents were moving into.

This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.

How are biographies charted? How is identity constructed? Can we relive our past, reinvent it, rearrange or recycle it? Can we really know who we are if we ignore where do we come from?

Best-selling author Graeme Armstrong reveals his passion for rave, meeting some of the superstar DJs and hardcore party people who created the vibrant and little-explored world of the Scottish rave scene.

The current trend to render prostitution a profession "as any other" is belied by women who were themselves prostitutes. With clarity and courage, the women in this film reveal the hidden face of that so-called "sex work". They are 22, 34 or 48 years old; they live in Montreal, Quebec and Ottawa - They have recently given up prostitution, or are trying to escape it. These women are leading the bitter fight to turn their lives around and it is a long and lonely struggle fraught with difficulties. Shot in a Cinéma Vérité style, The Fallacy (L'imposture) takes us to the heart of their realities.

In 1980, Jack Shae and Allen Moore, two ethnographic filmmakers from Harvard University, moved their families to the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides. Over the course of 18 months they documented the everyday lives and struggles of the crofters they lived among, whom were even then a vanishing breed. The film is in English and Gaelic. This carefully observed documentary by filmmakers Jack Shae and Allen Moore is a poetic ethnographic film in the style of their mentor, Robert Gardner (“Dead Birds”). It follows the rhythm of life on a wind-swept island in the Outer Hebrides through the four seasons and in the filmmakers’ observation of the day-to-day struggles of a vanishing society we see the deep-time legacy of their kind. The film is in English and Gaelic.

For 12,000 years wolves roamed Scotland. However, over three centuries ago, we exterminated them. This film reveals the rise and fall of the Scottish wolf and explores the question of whether they should be re-introduced. Wolves arrived as the last ice age ended, following the herds of deer and reindeer that crossed a now-lost land bridge from Europe. For thousands of years, wolves and humans shared the landscape as apex predators, with the wolf entering human art, myth and belief. However, farming put wolves and humans on a collision course, and, after centuries of persecution, wolves became extinct in Scotland. Since then, deer numbers have exploded, and many of Scotland’s woodlands have been stripped bare. Some argue for the wolf’s return. Could we, and should we, hear the howl of the wolf once more in the Highlands?

In late eighties, in Ceausescu's Romania, a black market VHS bootlegger and a courageous female translator brought the magic of Western films to the Romanian people and sowed the seeds of a revolution.

Wiedersehen mit Schottland - Auf den Spuren meiner ersten Motorradreise

A Local Iowa documentary about the history of trophy to the Cy-Hawk games.

Everyone knows Neil Armstrong came back from the Moon in 1969 – but it wasn’t until three years later, when the people of a tiny Scottish town stepped in, that he finally got home. Neil Armstrong and the Langholmites is a film about the day one of the world’s most famous men visited the small ‘burgh’ of Langholm and the profound emotional effect the place, and its people, had on the normally stoic astronaut. From Industria Studios and Duncan Cowles, director of acclaimed 2024 feature Silent Men, comes a wry and beautiful slice of Scottish life and a unique, lesser-known tale about one of America’s most famous sons.

An array of brave 1950s water skiing girls and guys bring a bit of Hollywood glamour to the chilly waters of Loch Earn.

In 1994, a masked man shot a waiter in the only Indian restaurant in the Orkney Islands. The murder remained unsolved for years, until new evidence emerged. Delve into one of Scotland's most controversial cases, now with powerful new testimony.

A celebration of the UK’s largest and highest National Park, The Cairngorms in Winter with Chris Townsend takes the viewer on a spectacular 96 minute journey through awe inspiring scenery in the heart of Scotland’s mountains.