NOLLYWOOD OR BUST

Nigeria made around a thousand films last year. Scotland made, er… one.

No folks, it’s nothing to do with April Fool’s Day. You might have thought I was joking when I wrote earlier about this country being a third-world filmmaking nation. So did I, but not after reading Hannah McGill’s piece in the Guardian –

film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2045524,00.html

Double-checking Scotland’s 2006 filmmaking output, sure enough, I found only one ‘Scottish’ film produced north of the border last year – David MacKenzie’s Hallam Foe. But it’s not what Scottish Screen would have us believe, not if you buy their press release.

Sure, Red Road was a success and deserved to be, but it was made in 2005. So was True North – but hang on, was that not a German film, with its dozen or so producers? Same goes for the others on Scottish Screen's list: The Last King of Scotland, The Queen and Shooting Dogs - but claiming them as in any way Scottish is pushing it a bit.

You might as well say Lucky Number Slevin was Scottish too because it was directed by Paul McGuigan. Just because a director ups and leaves doesn’t mean their films can pass the tartan test, though I guess if Paul had stayed put in Glasgow, his career would be non-existent. As for The Flying Scotsman, with more of a claim than the others, like True North it’s sitting on a shelf for want of a distributor. And no, Harry Potter doesn’t count either. Or The Da Vinci Code, or any of the other blockbusters that shot here for three days, hired a couple of runners, took a few taxis and made their getaway.

I’m not saying we should only be making small-minded, small-scale movies about Scottish subjects. Let’s leave parochial filmmaking to the English – the clapped out ‘gritty realism’ involving football and gangsters or upper class Aga angst based on the latest literary luvvie or Jane fucking Austen played by Americans for the nth time. Our filmmaking could and should be a lot more adventurous and outward looking than that. After all, we’re a different country with different social values and a different sense of humour. A thousand years of invasion and three hundred years of playing the underdog surely makes for better stories. Scotland probably has more in common with Nigeria than we'd like to think - an oppressed population, oil revenues leeched by multinationals and corrupt governments, poverty, bad housing, high mortality rate.

So how come Nigeria makes so many films while Scotland, a European nation, makes next to nothing? You’d think with all the subsidy sloshing about – Media, Film Council, the regional film agencies, city film offices - every filmmaker in the country would be run off their feet. Pointing the finger at the public funds might be obvious, but it’s the wrong target. No amount of public money makes a difference because no amount of public money is ever enough, not when movies cost millions, forcing producers to dip into the state funds of twenty different countries and pull a fast one with the books. Anyway, it’s not the fault of the public funds that a lot of these films never get seen. It’s not like the government owns the multiplexes.

But Hollywood does, judging by the number of American films playing in them. The Scottish film that gets an outing in a mainstream cinema is a novelty indeedy. When Hannah McGill says African filmmakers are attracting ‘international acclaim’ you need to ask if it’s just early hype for this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival or if it’s actually true. Which is worrying because if it’s really true it only makes Scotland’s film sector – its public bodies, producers, directors and writers - look all the more pathetic and deprived.

If there’s any logical conclusion, it’s this – scrap the subsidy. Which means getting rid of Scottish Screen because, overhead apart, it’s hard to justify an agency that acts mainly as a top-up for bigger, non-Scottish productions like Last King of Scotland. Not because they’re not Scottish but because no money ever finds its way back here in a way that benefits local filmmakers. And no, I’m not talking about David MacKenzie. You’d think with Hallam Foe - his fourth feature – he could have found the money elsewhere. Like, duh, Nigeria?