This film isn’t an animation but an art film, where, inspired by the work of Martyn Bennett, I worked carefully to mix and finesse the sound archives to the point of creating something new. I had funding from the National Geographic All Roads Film Fund, which existed to encourage film-making in indigenous cultures, and went into the archives without any preconception about where I would end up. Faodail means, roughly, “found thing”.
This film was broadcast on BBC ALBA in 2014 and, along with Tha thu air Aigeann m’ Inntinn, shortlisted for inclusion in the collection of the prestigous Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Dipping in and out of Gaelic and Scots stories, songs, recollections and invocations, Faodail mixes these intimate, shared moments preserved in time. Shifting narratives hint at personal and cultural loss, but with a persuasive power which will never fade. The sound is drawn entirely from the archives of the School of Scottish Studies, Alan Lomax, and Canna, and the images are reworked from Werner Kissling’s Eriskay: A Poem of Remote Lives, filmed in 1934.
I spent months in the Edinburgh-based archive (which contains 10,000 field recordings made over a 60 year period), allowing the material to lead me As time passed, I found myself drawn to the notion of partial memories, fragments, half-remembered things, not quite dead and gone, but dormant and capable of regrowth. As I explored this conundrum of cultural loss and rediscovery, scientists grew a flower from cells 30,000 years old. If these glimpses of a rich Gaelic life can be preserved in the archives, I wondered, is the culture safe from extinction?
I was also mesmerised by recordings of women enjoying each other’s company at work and play, and placed this powerful female camaraderie at the centre of the film.