Film Premiere: Dàn Fianais by Andrew Black

9 September 2021, 19:00  — 21:00

A87, Broadford, Highland, Scotland, IV49 9BF


Free but ticketed

a film still from Dàn Fianais, Andrew Black, 2021
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Join us as we gather to celebrate the launch of Andrew Black’s new community film Dàn Fianais. Bring your own bottle along and share in food, music and conversation for its first public screening at Broadford Community Hall.

(We will continue to observe social distancing at this event. Please use a lateral flow COVID test before coming along, and wear a mask if you can when moving around indoors. This is a seated event with limited numbers. We invite you to book a table for your own social bubble.)

About the film:

Dàn Fianais or Protest Poem is a film-portrait of Skye and Lochalsh and some of its inhabitants – human and otherwise. It was made with over sixty people with connections to Skye and Lochalsh – sharing the past and imagining the future – and commissioned in partnership with Skye Climate Action.

The film was made throughout the last year of the COVID pandemic, during an unfolding climate crisis, and at a point where the effects of capitalism and imperialism are being reckoned with globally. The film reflects on ways of being here that might feel lost though still within the reach of living memory – as well as those that endure – to suggest multiple possible ways forward.

Some of the contributors in Dàn Fianais are young activists advocating for their culture and their right to carry and shape it, and for fair solutions to the changes affecting villages and townships. Some spend their time working on the land and in their communities, in crofting, building and local organising. Others are storytellers, musicians, filmmakers, folklorists and academics recording and archiving their place and its culture – as well as remaking it and renewing it.

The title is a provocation; exploring how social action takes place by reimagining and revisiting place, community, and tradition. Collaged with traditional and experimental music and song, these conversations will hopefully open spaces for thinking of exciting possible local futures, moving away from leisure-industry narratives of untouched and unpeopled scenery.

As well as being a portrait of real people in a real place, this commission is intended as an open question to talk about what could be learned from the more communal, collaborative and interconnected forms of society that have not yet faded from the North-West Highlands, and how the tools for better ways of living together are already within reach.

The film is a co-commission by ATLAS Arts and Skye Climate Action (opens in a new tab)