Screenings

OutSideFilm#2 Fight Absurdity With Absurdity And Lies With Truth, Sheffield, April 2017

Langsett Independent Film Festival (October 2015)

Filmed Up, Manchester Cornerhouse (March 2015)

Canned Film Festival (September 2014)

Flatpack Film Festival (March 2014)

Aesthetica Short Film Festival (November 2013)

Nottingham Playhouse (Part of Digital Stage by The Cutting Room) (November 2013)

Kino Shorts 40 (September 2013)

Holmfirth Film Festival (May 2013)

Info

Written, recorded, edited, directed and produced by Alistair Innes Macdonald

Additional audio: Mark Crowe

Voiceover recording: Sebastian Salb

Cast

Traveller: Johannes Salb

Filmed on location on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in winter 2013.

Video recorded using a Sony FS100 digital video camera. Field sound was recorded on a Roland R-05 digital sound recorder. Voiceover recorded in Nuremberg.

An unidentified traveller visits an unidentified island with a hastily downloaded travel guide which may not be entirely accurate. Civil war, mutant sheep, irradiated seas, a prehistoric zoo and celebrity holiday homes figure heavily. Maybe.

Background

The video and most of the audio for Island Going were recorded on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides whilst researching another film about an even more remote Hebridean island. In thinking about the film I was inspired by the poet Louis MacNeice’s 1930’s account of his travels in the Hebrides – he wasn’t impressed. A further influence on the film was the Situationist practice of detournement, where one navigates around one space using a map of another space. I was interested in the possibility of making someone see in the landscape what probably isn’t there. The desolate beauty of the Outer Hebrides also fascinated me but I wanted to make a film that did not concentrate on the usual or identifiable parts of the landscape.