Category: GFF strand – Pioneer

Manic pixie dream girl Anais careens carelessly into everyone’s life searching for herself and passion and love. Because she is young, and thin, and white, and pretty, everyone finds this adorably charming, and she faces no consequences and is never held accountable for her impact on others.

I know it’s a tradition to romanticise carefree young women in summer dresses for their light-hearted and uncomplicated ways. So let me just make this plain, this is not a complaint about Anais trying to find herself, or shagging about, or wanting to stay single and child-free with her options open. This is about Anais being The Worst.

She literally gives not one fuck about anyone else in this movie. The closest we come is when she finds out her mum’s cancer has come back and is sad. This lasts all of a scene, and even though the doctor tells her her mother is scared and will need her by her side when she goes through the chemo, Anais quickly boosts out of there, on to stalking her next shag. Later, she writes her mother a draft of a letter saying she thinks if her mother was really passionate about something in life, then her cancer wouldn’t have come back, or maybe if she loved her husband more. The Absolute Fucking Worst.

Her brother Balthazar feeds Xanax to their pal’s pet lemur and it overdoses, and she stands over it as he tries to figure out how to stop it from dying and is like, “Do you think I know how to love?” Another belter is when she tells her thesis supervisor she’ll organise an academic symposium with him, then ditches that to pursue the latest object of her obsession, and when he calls literally the day before it starts to say, ‘where the fuck are you? You have all the documents for the presentations’, she’s like, ‘Aw, family emergency, my mum has cancer’, then phones her cancer-ridden mother to back up her lie, while she swans about on a beach. It begs the question, what exactly does someone young, thin, white, and pretty have to do to be considered an insufferable cunt?

All that doesn’t even touch on the core plot. She leaves her current boyfriend, who tells her he loves her, because he’s upset that she is never on time to see him, acts like he is an afterthought, and casually drops into conversation that she’s having an abortion. Having the abortion is not the problem, it’s the mentioning it in passing while deciding where to go now you’re too late for the pictures. His hurt is such a downer, so she starts shagging her father’s publisher, a man her father’s age who is in a long term relationship. When she shows up on his doorstep with all her stuff looking to move in on, like, their third date or whatever, and he doesn’t handle in exactly the way she hoped, she ditches him and contemplates going back to the first guy. Then she reads the publisher’s partner’s books and become obsessed with her. Seeing in her writing a kindred soul, she pursues and seduces her.

“I think the same way she does. We share a vision, personality, tastes,” she says before she’s even met the woman. “He [the publisher] picked the same woman 20 years younger.” It’s not so much Emilie, the publisher’s wife, that Anais falls in love with, but herself that she sees in the other woman. Emilie astutely catches just that. “What you feel for me, sorry, isn’t love, it’s an illusion. Of course it is. You projected a lot onto me.” Right on the money, Emilie.

Anais isn’t charming, she’s a narcissist. And the total lack of consequences for her perpetual self-centredness is frustrating and depressing.

It’s hard to comment on the film as separate from the character of Anais, as she is the film’s entire focus. The movie literally is about Anais In Love, just in love with herself. Even with the strong performances and the film’s technical accomplishments, it’s difficult to frame its merits and demerits independent from its central point.

P.S. Anais also doesn’t pay her rent, so sublets to a Korean couple for Airbnb, tells them the gas cooker’s dangerous, but doesn’t tell them she smashed up the fire alarm, or replace it, and they almost die in a fire while cooking a meal, and nearly burn down the landlord’s apartment. Just The Worst.

Bloody great movie!

Zalava is about a small village in Iran in 1978 which everyone is convinced is under attack by demons. Set before the Revolution, the village of Zalava is in Kurdistan, and home to a community of settled gypsies. There superstition and belief in demons rules.

Massoud, a sergeant in the local gendarme, decides to confiscate the villagers weapons, as the trusted method for checking if someone is possessed is shooting them in the leg. This is his first mistake, and it kicks off the plot of the whole film. Demons are supposedly afraid or put off by metal, so a bullet in the leg will send them packing. But with the guns taken by the sergeant, the villagers have to corner the possessed girl armed with sickles, and in her fear, she backs away over a ledge, and falls to her death.

The death of the girl enflames the villagers even more, and gives Massoud a sense of responsibility for setting the situation right. When he discovers a charismatic exorcist called Amardan is in the village, he becomes convinced the man is a charlatan, stoking the hysteria for profit. He promptly arrests him and takes him, and the jar he claims contains a trapped demon into custody.

First things first, this film is gorgeous. Like, guh-hor-geous! The colour, the use of the light, everything just makes it beautiful to watch. Loved it!

Zalava is about the power of belief. Massoud underestimates this power, believing that logic and reason will eventually bring people to their senses. How often have you seen that working?

There are plenty of hints at a reasonable explanation for what is happening in Zalava. There is a doctor in town who is investigating a condition that is causing the villagers to develop white patches on their skin and hair. She is struggling to complete her research and discover the cause because of the commotion caused by the hysteria. So far, all she knows is the villagers’ test results show unusually high adrenaline levels. So maybe their condition or disease is causing an excessive production of panic hormones, which is causing their behaviour to become irrational.

Another possibility is the land Zalava sits on is coveted by a dam construction company, and it just so happens Amardan used to work for that company. Now here he is, scaring the shit out of people, til they’re so terrified they’re willing to leave or shoot each other.

But equally the villagers have their own interpretation, seeing their white patches as signs of affliction from a source of evil. They consider the fact that Amardan left a well-paying job at a dam company for a life protecting poor people from demons as a sign that he is on their side. Besides, the dam construction has been plagued with problems, which the villagers attribute to Amardan directing the cast-out demons towards the dam.

Zalava is a horror film. Folk won’t say that coz it’s so gorgeous, they’ll want to call it a human drama, but that’s what it is. It is a film about the dark and destructive nature of man, and whether the demon is real or not, the damage its idea evokes is.

As I say, Zalava is about the power of belief, but not just for the villagers. Massoud believes too much in nothing, he is too sure that the invisible can’t hurt him, and too unrelenting in his insistence on it. For those who think what you can’t see can’t hurt you, watching Zalava you will find out different.

Just like The Quiet Girl, this is a wholesome film that goes straight for the heart.

Ebrahim is good boy who lives with his mother and 5 siblings. Since the disappearance of his father, he must earn money to keep the family going.

The film shows Ebrahim’s story from his perspective. To someone on the outside, this might be a tragic story, of a boy burdened with too much responsibility, pulled out of school and forced into child labour, poverty constantly snapping at his heels. But that’s not how Ebrahim sees it. Yes, everyone agrees he should be in school, the film, his mum, and him all would ideally like that. But just because his circumstances have fallen short of that, doesn’t mean his story is tragic or he should be viewed with pity.

This is a great story for showing people, even children, with agency, and having their own viewpoint on their own lives. Ebrahim is a happy kid. You would expect him to miss playing with classmates at school, but he plays with his brothers and sisters all the time. In them, he has plenty of friends. And you might expect work to be a grind that wears him down. But for Ebrahim, it is getting to meet new people and do interesting things.

Watching this in Glasgow, the concept of work and play are diametrically opposite, but in some cultures there is the same word for both. You can see that mingling when Ebrahim is climbing up trees to shake down dates. Or taking tourists out to see beauty spots in the local area. Ebrahim has a clean heart that is happy to help. He is kind to everyone he meets. He sees work as an opportunity, not as a burden.

Another example of what I absolutely loved about this film is that one of Ebrahim’s siblings has no hands. It’s never mentioned. Not once. He is never excluded nor presumed incapable, just treated identically to the rest of the children. With the innocence of childhood, his difference is immaterial.

I also love that the film also doesn’t pretend that Ebrahim is anything other than a kid. Even though he has such a good nature, he buys shopping on the way home from work, and his mum just stands over the bags, going, “What junk have you bought?” while pulling out 2-litre bottles of blue fizz. One day, for a treat, Ebrahim asks his mum if he can make pizza, and makes the most loaded cheesy pepperoni pizza you ever saw.

This film is just full of the warm joy of being around family. Of eating with, playing with, and providing for family. Staying together, with a light heart. Ebrahim is such a good soul.

Loved it.

What the fuck was that?

I mean, I don’t know what they were even going for here. The plot is vaguely this: Lisa is moving out the flat she shares with her pals. A couple of other things are going on, Lisa’s maw has the hots for one of the movers, there’s a lot of shagging going on, their neighbours run in and out. But nothing is really happening here. Which would be fine if there was something else to hold your interest. But it’s just folk shuffling about, punctuated by these long, boring, pointless monologues, which if you were to do in real life would get you chased for kak patter. I mean, the synopsis describes it as “tragicomic” and an “emotional roller-coaster”, and it’s like, what film were you watching? Maybe there is something lost in translation, but that was as boring as actually moving flat.

Ruth Wilson stars as Kate, a middle-aged single woman suffocating in her rundown seaside town and her tedious as fuck office job. She works for the brew, where she meets Blonde, recently released from jail and looking to sign on. An affair with him looks sure to blow the dust off her life.

Firstly, obviously, Ruth Wilson is brilliant in this. Really layered performance, able to make every hesitation or glance communicate such vulnerability. Tom Burke plays Blonde, a rough around the edges guy, whose intentions always seem ambiguous.

From the outset Kate sees Blonde as someone who can make her feel alive. She wants what everybody wants, passion, excitement, connection. But beneath that, Kate hates her life, and is looking for someone to help her burn it all down.

Blonde is a very ambiguous character, because this film is Katie’s story, and he just happened to wander into it. It’s hard to tell who he is from who Kate needs him to be, and if he is deliberately and consciously playing into that difference or if, still further, he has his own objectives in mind. My first thought when they met was, “He’s gonna turn you out”. He definitely has the gaslighter’s guidebook to hand. The way he treats her comes off as a play to keep her off balance and doubting herself, usually prep for an abusive relationship.

Yet as time goes on, I began to wonder if that was just what Kate was seeing in him. While she’s not exactly middle class, he jokes that she’s ‘well brought up’ and ‘proper’. It’s obvious she looks at him as her piece of rough. When she asks him about his criminal history, she obviously wants to be thrilled by scary stories, but he snorts and tells her he was only inside 4 months. You wonder if she is trying to exploit this guy, who comes from a chaotic and broke background, where there’s some petty crime to survive, into fulfilling her bad boy fantasy. And maybe he’s playing into it, being the big man who treats the mean and keeps them keen, more to fulfil her expectations than as any reflection of his reality. Maybe there’s no intention of turning her out, maybe he’s just a broke guy who met her at the dole office, and whose changeability is less a play and more standard behaviour for his fragmented homelife.

So is this prep for something darker, something dangerous, something life-changing? Is it just the scattered and scadging ways of a man who grew up in a less than reliable and plentiful environment? And either way, is his affection for her actually real?

For that matter, is hers? She thinks she’s falling in love with him, but as I say, you see very little of him beyond her enthrallment with his rough and tumble ways. What she loves is the way he makes her feel. That he gives her an excuse to bunk off from the work she hates, to ditch the nights out with the friends she doesn’t like, and potentially provide her with a new and more exciting life.

Kate . . . isn’t actually that nice a person. She’s very sympathetic because she’s lonely and stultified, but she doesn’t really care about anybody else. Now, the people around her don’t seem very nice either, but that’s a little beside the point. Blonde tells her they’re not her “tribe”, which might be the case, they’re all heavily invested in their 2.4 kids and 9 to 5 lifestyles. Kate is viewed with pity and dismay to still be single and not committed to work. They all have a narrative of Kate The Failure, Kate The Fuckup, and whatever she tells them about herself, or her relationship with Blonde, is made to fit into it.

But, like, there might be good reason for that. We’re joining very late in the story, and maybe all these people are arseholes, or maybe Kate does have a long history of making incredibly bad choices. Maybe this isn’t the first disreputable guy she’s used as an excuse to go into a self-centred spiral. Maybe this is a familiar stop on the cycle for these people. Plus, she doesn’t seem to give a shit about any of them, she never has any concern about what might be going on in their lives. For example, the friend she ditched, the one who is super judgemental about Blonde, she got Kate the office job she is now skiving off from and taking the piss at. It never occurs to Kate to figure that in to her considerations. Maybe her pal has good reason to be pissed off.

True Things could be billed as a love story, but it’s more a complex character study of someone searching for something she needs. Love, sex, passion seem to be currency for some unsated yearning. And the players who pass it back and forth seem to be as much a mystery to themselves as to each other.

Just a fucking excellent film.

Her Way is a film about a mother trying to do the best for her son. Marie is a single mother, raising her son Adrien alone. He is 17 and going through a difficult time. He is sullen, lazy, stoned and feckless. Marie is at her wit’s end trying to get through to him. The only thing he has ever shown any interest in is cooking. When he is expelled from school, the public school system is a bit like, ‘Eh, maybe your fuckup son would be better off in P.E. You could be a security guard!’

Determined her son won’t set his sights any lower, Marie decides to try and get him into one of the most prestigious private schools for training chefs. He gets in, but she has to raise the tuition fees. Marie works as a prostitute but struggles to earn enough cash from her regular clients. The film follows her as she turns to more and more desperate measures to get the money.

Her son Adrien is a frustrating character. It’s hard to watch Marie go to such lengths, calling in favours, suffering indignities, and working flat out, only to come home to a pig sty, sticking of weed, with her red-eyed, jobless son still in bed at midday. You want to slap him.

But I can also see myself as a teenager in him. He has sunk down inside himself and is already certain of the outcome of any of his efforts. It’s so frustrating to watch Marie fight so hard, when her son doesn’t fight at all. But he’s convinced it will all end in failure, so he thinks she is a fool to try. And like, he’s not wrong, raising this money is a huge feat, and the odds are stacked against them succeeding. But that’s what his mother has that he hasn’t – hope. And self-belief. And that is what she is trying to teach him.

I also like that they didn’t simply make Marie a stereotype of ‘the whore with a heart of gold’. You root for her, you admire her, but she does some well dodgy stuff over the course of this. For one, she’s a racist. She’s an activist for sex workers’ rights, advocating at rallies for total legalisation. But she refuses to give flyers to black women who are selling sex, for the most traditional of racist reasons, the standard ‘coming over here, taking our jobs’ bullshit. Despite holding signs at the rally saying “Not guilty, Not a victim, Proud to be a whore”, she describes the black workers as “slaves”. It’s the dumbest, most self-defeating thing in the world, but Marie is not simply a cipher of what the audience want to cheer on, she’s complicated, messy, and sometimes shit.

Her Way is a great film, about what we pass down to our kids, how we give them what they need. All the way through the film you hope Adrien will break out of his defeatism, that he will see the lengths his mother is going to for him, to realise that his future must be something worthwhile if she will put in this much effort. Honestly had a tear in my een by the end. Brilliant.

A Banquet is a horror film in the vein of mental illness or possession? Focusing on a family of a mother and her daughters, anorexia is transformed into preparation for sainthood or the affliction of the demon-possessed.

Dunno what it is but I feel like recently I’ve just seen a bunch of stuff that was like an eating disorder in a can. This has everything you’d expect, from the loud chewing and squelching, to the scrape of cutlery on plates, to the images of rotting food.

The family consists of the mother, Holly, the eldest daughter, Betsey, and her wee sister, Isabelle. The film starts with the dad at home in the livingroom in a hospital bed. He is gagging and wrenching, tortuously and terminally ill. The mum is bleaching down the chair next to the bed, presumably where he’s just puked. She goes to the kitchen to puree something she hopes he might keep down, and returns to find he’s swiped the bleach she left by his bed, drank it, and is now vomiting blood all over the floor. She screams for help, as upstairs Betsey looks on in horror.

Enough to give anyone a complex.

I have to say, I fucking hated the mother in this. She gets more sympathetic as the film goes on, but by god it’s a low bar to clear. Firstly, their house is like a sterile showroom. It’s like no one lives there. They have this wank design of a sunken livingroom with a glass wall, all painted black with white PVC flooring. There’s not a mark on the floor or white countertops, and it’s like, don’t you have two kids living here? Literally any sign of their presence in this pristine tableau of monied taste is met with immediate exclamation and haranguing. Even her husband, when he went as far as to sully the place with all-too-human infirmity, only became another thing she had to scrub all evidence of from the furnishings.

Secondly, it’s clear that she relates to her oldest as a co-parent. And not in a ‘thanks for helping out now your dad’s dead’ type way, but an entitlement of constant support for her ridiculous bullshit. In one of the first scenes, the mum and the wee sister arrive home, and Isabelle kicks off her shoes in the hall. Not willing to tolerate this for even a second, the mum starts barraging her to pick them up and set them neatly to the side, then throws a look to Betsey in her room as if to say, “See what I have to put up with?” It’s like Betsey’s a teenager, she’s got her friends in, she’s actually meant to be socialising with them and not having to monitor her little sister’s shoe placement, or your insane neat freak obsession. Like, it’s not Betsey’s job to be on your side on this, she’s not your co-parent, she’s a teenager with as much interest in casual shoe removal as you’d expect a teenager to have. I know that seems like a massive rant about a tiny interaction in an early scene, but it just set up the dynamic perfectly, and made me absolutely hate Holly throughout.

Betsey on the other hand seems to have no sense of herself. She is reactive to her mother’s needs but has no sense of her own. When the careers counsellor asks her what she wants to apply for at uni, she can’t pick a subject. When he tells her to make a list of things she’s interested in, it stays blank. She’s so out of touch with her own wants and needs, because she’s clearly never had them prioritised. Isabelle dances and ice skates, but Betsey has nothing. She struggles even to assert herself among her peers, so used as she is to being rolled over.

Into this dynamic comes a blood red moon. Betsey sees it while at a party, and entranced, follows it into the woods. When she comes back she no longer eats.

The mother distinguishes herself once more, by reacting to this with all the calm and tact you’d expect. She tries to force her to eat at the family dinner table, by turns patronisingly wheedling, then rageful. When Isabelle tries to stick up for her big sister, suggesting they respect her boundaries and not put pressure on her, the mother turns on her too. And I know you’re reading this, thinking, ‘That’s what any good mother would do, try to get their kid to eat’. But it doesn’t feel like this is out of any concern for Betsey’s wellbeing. It feels like this is irk at her defiance. That her refusal to eat is willful, rather than viewing it with any empathy.

That sense of her daughter’s abstinence as a personal insult to her dominance of the household becomes clear when the doctor refers Betsey for psychiatric help. “You’re not crazy!” she insists, more concerned with distancing herself from the label than dealing with her daughter’s mental health problem.

At the dinner table, she brings up the starving children in Africa to manipulate Betsey with guilt. On the one and only occasion Isabelle decides to leave the table without finishing off her plate, primarily so she doesn’t have to listen to her mum’s constant criticism, the mother tells Betsey, “I will not let you infect this family”. She says, “Anorexia. You know who gets it? Entitled middle-class white girls.” WRONG! Shaming her own daughter for having a mental illness, this, bear in mind, after she recently saw her father die. Holly then forcibly weighs her, all the while screaming at her, then makes her keep a diary of her weight, to be taken twice a day. I think that’s how you give someone an eating disorder. Also, weight changes naturally over the course of a week, just with fluid intake and things like that, literally nothing can be learned by weighing someone twice a day. Anyway, let’s all agree, what a cunt.

Betsey meanwhile goes from someone who could barely assert herself, to someone who is rigid in the face of any pressure. She slowly shifts the power balance between her and her mother. Her mum goes from screaming commands to eventually begging. Then Betsey announces that she’s had a religious awakening upon seeing that red moon, she is some kind of prophet who has seen the end times.

Now’s really the time for mental health intervention, but despite the physical trial being Betsey’s, it’s her mother who’s undergoing the real gauntlet. As things get worse and worse, further and further away from the perfect image she is trying to project, her mother finds a kind of liberation. When everything is such a disaster, she has to decide what really matters. And her initial selfishness gives way to real empathy and a genuine attempt to relate to what her daughter is going through.

The whole time the question is open to whether this is anorexia and psychosis, or if Betsey really has become the prophet of some god, foretelling end times. Whatever the answer, the horror is how it swallows this family.

Hive is the story of Fahrije, a Kosovan woman who tries to support herself by making ajvar relish. In her community, for a woman to even drive a car is considered scandalous, so it’s an uphill struggle.

Based on a true events, Fahrije’s story was big news in Kosovo. The trouble was Fahrije’s husband was disappeared in the Kosovan war in the 90s. So she was in this state of being effectively widowed without ever having the confirmation of her husband’s death. She was in this between state of being both married and widowed. As a married woman, it was her place to keep the home and not work. As a widow, it was her place to live with and look after her in-laws. Neither involves providing for yourself or your family by working outside the home.

In the film you see Fahrije is devoted to her in-laws. She lives with her father-in-law who she affords great respect. But he is wheelchair-bound, and can only make a little money by selling the honey from the family beehives. You’d think practicality would immediately triumph, given how useful it would be if she could drive him about, and produce more money for the family. But old ways die hard.

There is a constant attempt to intimidate Fahrije, a collective sense of disapproval and looming consequences. When events do happen, there is no one villain with a face, just handfuls of men growling daggers and bricks getting chucked through her windows. At first even the women are against her striking out, they tell her that people will say she’s driving hither and thither coz she’s seeing men, that her reputation will be destroyed and that of her family. They are frightened to help her in case the same is said about them.

But as time goes on and God doesn’t strike her dead for selling jars of ajvar relish, the women come to see that she can be a provider for herself and her family. Even her father-in-law, who discouraged her but never outright forbade her, eventually ends up helping. Together that they realise they are capable of more than they ever thought.

Given the grim context and the Balkan gift for brevity of speech, I wondered if this film might be hard going. But it actually is a film of resolution, strength, and overcoming adversity. It even has moments of pure joy and warmth. Great film.

Killing Escobar is a documentary about an operation by British mercenaries to kill Pablo Escobar in 1989. The film focuses on Peter McAleese, a Glasgow born ex-SAS soldier who took to mercenary work in various colonial and Cold War conflicts. His reputation was such that he was hired by Dave Tompkins, an arms dealer and soldier for hire, who had been commissioned by a rival cartel in Colombia to kill drug baron Pablo Escobar. There was a cartel war at the time, and so many innocent people were dying as a result of their bombings and attacks, that all authorities kinda turned a blind eye to the assassination mission, hoping that its success might bring about a cessation of hostilities.

Now, everyone in this is a bastard. There are no good guys in this. But it is nonetheless a remarkable story. There is a huge about of preparation, arms, and money poured into the operation. They go into detail about how it would work, with dramatic re-enactments. And they have interviews with a lot of surprising players, like the head of Escobar’s personal security.

A high-stakes tale of derring-do, fronted by a baw-heided Glaswegian and his massively shady mate.

Yer Old Faither is about the life of John Croall, a Glasgow native who emigrated to Australia, to the little town of Whyalla. It is a film which traces out the extraordinary impact of an ordinary life. Or not entirely ordinary, because Croall was a bit of a character.

The film traces his professions and passions, his love and concern for life. When he arrived in Australia, he was so impressed with the huge range of beautiful foliage. He had that immigrant’s ability to see with new eyes what everyone else takes for granted. He loved golf, but was unimpressed with the golf course in Whyalla, so he quietly began growing tree samplings, and planting them out on the golf course and surrounding areas. Over his lifetime he planted somewhere between five and six thousand trees.

He was an obstetrician, and delivered three generations of babies over his 40-year career serving Whyalla. Despite being seen as a bit of an eccentric, which was fair, he was very highly regarded. The nurses and midwives interviewed all spoke of him very highly, saying he had magic fingers, and was able to turn a breach when no one else could. He was dedicated and would come out any hour of the day or night when called, and would take all night turning a baby, no matter how long it took he had the patience. They said he was an expert in breach births, and could make successful deliveries other doctors wouldn’t even attempt. For a many years, he was Whyalla’s only obstetrician and was prepared to take on that work and responsibility solo. When he started working there, the mortality rate among mothers and babies dropped.

He was also the only doctor performing abortions outside of the cities in South Australia. He ensured women in Whyalla could get safe healthcare and terminations right there in their local hospital. And it was a bit of a discovery to his daughter, when putting the film together, that he had in fact studied to be a priest in the Vatican. He was raised Catholic in Glasgow, was sent to the seminary, then sent to study in Rome for 7 years. Then finally sacked it, and became a doctor. And this was never a point of conflict for him, because he disagreed with the Church’s view on reproductive health entirely. So he really led the way in reproductive care in his part of the world.

After he retired, the midwives lamented, they were unable to find anyone to replace him, as a small post-industrial town away from the city wasn’t a very attractive destination for a new doctor. They no longer had 24-hour care in the maternity unit, they were served only by a rotating locum, and they wouldn’t come out when off duty, and some even had to be flown in from Germany and America, with one obstetrician’s caesarean section rate well above 70%, when Croall’s had been at 8%. When Croall retired, his retirement party wasn’t thrown by management, but by the nurses and midwives. He was a doctor who was very well respected by women.

And in his free time, he made tables from recycled wood. Towards the end of the film, one of the trees in his garden has to come down, and he decides to turn it into a table, and it feels like a metaphor for the breadth of his impact, that here is this tree he planted 40 years ago, grown thick and solid, and now felled and also turned into something beautiful. It is like even with the trees in Whyalla, he cares for them cradle to grave.

As the film comes to the end of its story and the end of Croall’s life, they start playing Caledonia. And I, of course, burst into to tears. You can’t do that to us, you know that’s the Scottish kryptonite! The film just radiates with the love his family have for him, and he for them, and his love for his community, and the town’s love for him, and his love for nature, and these wide vines of impact he had for the better in his little corner of the world, in his garden. It’s just so moving, such a beautiful portrait, such a celebration of this quietly extraordinary ordinary man.