Films 2025
We have three lyrically beautiful films to show this year. Our new landscape film spans the immensity of geological time – from the ancient mountains of Caithness to the Stromness granite on Brinkie’s Brae, from the young dynamic sand hills of Dunnet Bay to boulder clay in Shapinsay that marks a long-ago flow of ice.
The presenters tell the story, with sweeping panoramas from our new drone above. It’s part of a growing body of material providing a unique insight into the story of the making of the landscapes of the north.
The passage of time is the theme of a new film by a Russian filmmaker, shown at West Side Cinema, looking at buildings in a world of rock and concrete, and with an introduction on cultural geologies and the relation between people and stone in Neolithic Orkney.
And a concert of music and poetry will include an underwater film of the gracefully coordinated movements of pilot whales, with live words and music to accompany them.
A stunning new film from a master documentary maker. “Hypnotic. Goes beyond architecture to take us into the secret world of rocks and stones,” wrote one reviewer. Victor Kossakovsky’s earlier films included Gunda on animal consciousness and Aquarela on the natural wonder of water.
Selena S. Kuzman’s new film is a groundbreaking visualisation of the enormity of geological time. Geologist Adrian Hall is joined again by Mara Gibb from Caithness and Katy Firth from Orkney on a grand scenic journey. Their vistas rise to Scaraben, the ancient island mountain, and over the tors on Smean, touching some of the oldest rock surfaces in the British Isles. They see in contrast the young, dynamic sand hills at Dunnet Bay. They cross to Stromness and Brinkie’s Brae, a granite stump of the once mighty Caledonian mountain chain. On Shapinsay they find pristine Devonian lava flows and boulder clay streamlined by the passage of the last ice sheet.
Arctic voyages searching for whales, and for lost ships – these form a collaboration between two musicians and a poet, in a blend of sound from traditional Shetland fiddle music to creative improvisation with instruments, electronics and voice. The music develops from the complex songs of the great whales, and the men who hunted them in hostile Greenland seas – and Captain Francis McClintock’s voyage in the yacht Fox to seek traces of the lost Franklin expedition.
