The trailer and early reviews for Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything have come out, and I was struck by some similarities in the way critics were discussing that film and the slippery documentary portrait I edited, Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon.

Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon:

• “overt creative evasiveness”
• Gordon is “an active author of his own mythos”
• “subject and saboteur”​
• “the lifelong, self-stylized performance of eccentricity”
• “reframes our perception of the artist but also of biographical documentary filmmaking”
• "Gordon remains a somewhat elusive figure... You get the sense he doesn’t really know either, and perhaps that’s the point"

You Can See Everything:

• “is the truth really nakedly present, or is it palatably performed?”
• “without ever arriving at some definitive new truth”
• “it understands how elusive such truth can be”
• “its willingness to sit with contradiction”
• “skeptical … about the process of documentary filmmaking itself”
• “its refusal to provide easy answers feels less like a flaw than the point”

​The films are very different, but both are portraits of subjects who refuse to give their filmmakers easy answers and actively participate in constructing the films being made about them. Both use performance to complicate rather than conceal the subject, draw the filmmaker in front of the camera and turn the relationship between filmmaker and subject into part of the portrait itself.

It got me thinking again about documentary performance. As something potentially revealing in itself rather than something to get through or around in the hope of eventually reaching the “real” person. And, more specifically, about what performance is doing in Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon.

Towards the end of Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon, the artist is carrying a heavy work across his studio, with the help of director Finlay Pretsell. With a sudden gasp, Douglas trips and collapses to the floor. As Douglas lies there, frozen for a moment, Finlay asks if he is alright. Douglas jumps up and says he’s fine, quipping “It’s all acting, mate.” It’s a funny line, but like a lot of things Douglas says it manages to destabilise what has just happened. Was he struggling or pretending to struggle? Was the admission itself another performance? Does knowing that he was acting make the preceding moment less useful as documentary, or does the fact that he chose to perform that particular version of himself tell us something we couldn’t have discovered by waiting for him to forget the camera was there? I know that in dramatic terms it’s a great emotional lever for reminding the viewer that Douglas is both a vulnerable figure and a playful trickster, provides a visual metaphor for the weight of art on Douglas’ shoulder, and nicely rounds off his relationship with Finlay, all as we head towards the film’s conclusion. So who cares what’s true?

This problem/solution runs through the film. Douglas is an extraordinarily performative person and is completely aware of it. Performance and the supposed absence of performance are observed and narrated by someone sophisticated enough to know that the documentary camera is always asking him to become Douglas Gordon, or perhaps one of many Douglas Gordons.

There is an assumption embedded in much documentary filmmaking that somewhere under the dust and grime of performance lies the gleaming truth of the real person. Keep filming for long enough and eventually it rubs off. Ask the question another way. Leave the camera rolling after the interview has supposedly finished. Catch the glance before the answer, a hesitation, or the moment when the subject forgets they are being watched. These become privileged moments in the edit because they seem to offer access to a version of the person uncorrupted by their awareness of being filmed. I am increasingly unsure why this version should automatically be considered more truthful. The director/editor Robert Greene (no stranger to dancing on the edge of documentary performance) says that "the best documentary characters have always been, on some level, great performers." Why should identifiable performance be considered less revealing than supposed authenticity?

The sociologist Erving Goffman argued in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), that social identity is something we enact in relation to other people, and that the fact that it is enacted does not make it false:

“All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.” 

Ordinary social life already contains staging, roles, conventions, rehearsed behaviours, audiences and attempts to control how we are perceived. Performance isn’t confined to theatrical pretence. Talking differently to your mother than to a curator is performance. Changing your behaviour when you walk into a gallery opening is performance. Telling a story in a particular way because you know your friend enjoys it is performance. So is Douglas becoming combative with Finlay, becoming charming with somebody else, playing the outrageous artist, telling a childhood story, or announcing to the camera that he is performing. These performances are affected by the construction of the film and the presence of the camera, but they don't necessarily begin and end with those conditions.

Goffman writes that the self is “a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.” An uncomfortable idea behind his dramaturgical understanding of social interactions is that there may not be a completely formed, authentic self sitting behind all these performances. Goffman goes further: what if the distinction itself is misleading? What if performance is not something obscuring the self, or lack of, underneath, but constructing it?

The question becomes particularly strange when making a portrait of an artist, because performance is so often central to the way an artist constructs a public and private self. To remove it in search of some supposedly purified person underneath could be removing precisely the thing you are trying to understand. Douglas jokes, provokes, threatens, exaggerates, cries, directs, contradicts, insults, withdraws and seduces in ways that make you question where the line between his art and his life lies, or if there even is one. He also repeatedly tells us that this is what he is doing. Rather than concealing the mechanism of ambiguous interpretation he makes the mechanism the subject - “ambiguity is what it’s all about”, he says. Some people find this uncomfortable, countering that they want clarity on who he is, but I think what they are asking for is the comfort of a lie, because Douglas, like all of us, is not a singular definitive version that can be cleanly articulated but a complex series of interrelated performances. I think the discomfort comes from a denial of that amorphous sense of self that we know deep down is true, and a fear of the hard work of interpretation required to understand how these performances might coalesce.

Documentary has been worrying about this problem for most of its history. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin made the instability explicit in their sociological experiment documentary Chronicle of a Summer. From the basis of a debate on whether or not it is possible to be sincere on camera, Rouch and Morin conduct interviews with an array of participants and then screen those interviews to the same interviewees and film the responses. Some accused others of performing or being false. What initially looked like a failure of their experiment in authenticity eventually became its essential conclusion, that the problem wasn’t deciding which people had been authentic and which had performed but discovering that the distinction was clouded, and perhaps unimportant when determining the truth and meaning of what was conveyed. Morin came to the wonderfully troublesome conclusion that in trying to leave theatre behind and reach life directly, they had discovered that life itself also contained theatre. Despite the seminal standing of the film, more than sixty years later documentary still seems strangely embarrassed by this determination.

We routinely manufacture situations in which people will perform and then edit those performances according to an idea of authenticity that has no basis other than our own empathic senses. There is nothing wrong with recognising value in spontaneous emotion, but the problem is imagining that spontaneity has some exclusive relationship with truth. We sit someone under lights, clip a microphone to their shirt, put three lenses and several strangers in front of them, ask them to revisit the death of their mother or the worst thing they have ever done and then judge one answer to be more “real” because some mannerism or broken voice affected us emotionally in the way we would hope. Often, comfort under these conditions is seen as a prerequisite to cultivating a useful account from the person interviewed - which is distinctly different to how the police might use some of the same tools to cultivate their desired truth.

The film scholar Stella Bruzzi has argued against this anxiety by describing documentaries as inherently performative encounters in which subject, filmmaker, apparatus, and eventually spectator, create meaning together:

"What else is a documentary but a dialogue between a filmmaker, a crew, and a situation that, although in existence prior to their arrival, has irrevocably been changed by that arrival?" 

The camera doesn't record reality, but rather its presence becomes one of the conditions under which this particular reality occurs. That seems obvious when written down, yet a huge amount of documentary grammar is designed to conceal it. The clean interview removes the question. The reaction shot suggests causal continuity between things that may have happened some time apart. Archive illustrates testimony as if one simply confirms the other. Conflicting accounts are organised until one becomes dominant. Repetitions are removed, contradictory statements are reconciled, characters acquire arcs, difficult ambiguity is clarified, and eventually several hundred hours of messy, inconsistent human behaviour emerge as ninety intelligible minutes in which everyone seems to know why they did what they did. An act of turning the chaos of life into coherence. But coherence is not the same thing as truth.

Film editing is uniquely capable of making somebody appear coherent. If someone gives a dozen contradictory explanations, I can simply select the three that agree. If their behaviour changes wildly between one shoot and the next, I can choose the behaviour that best serves the version of them the film has already established. If someone contradicts themselves ten minutes into a stirring sequence, I can remove the contradiction because the audience has already understood the “point” - the director’s version of the supposed truth. But all I’ve really done is to make a Director's Cut of the performances originally self-directed by the participants filmed.

A 'good' editor spends a great deal of time removing things that feel repetitive, extraneous, contradictory or unresolved, but sometimes that is exactly the wrong thing to do. With Douglas, contradiction slowly became less like a problem to solve and more like the material from which the portrait could be made. He insists that he doesn’t seek approval and then repeatedly negotiates how he will be represented. He describes himself as fearless and then speaks about the enormous responsibilities he feels towards his family. He constructs the dangerous mythology of the artist surrounded by knives, fire, broken glass and chaos, while elsewhere insisting that what matters about him is that he looks after people. He wants Finlay to direct him, complains when Finlay does so, tries to direct the film himself and then reminds Finlay that the real question of trust will come later, in the editing. You could treat these as inconsistencies requiring editorial management, but they are better understood as the inconsistencies that are Douglas Gordon.

Portraiture has never required a single stable view of a person. Warhol’s Screen Tests (incidentally, the Nico portrait features in Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon) take almost the opposite route by imposing an absurd degree of stillness and simplicity on the subject and watch the effort of maintaining a pose become part of the portrait. As the strange tension between posing and simply existing gives the films their psychological charge, the absurdity of demarcating where performance begins and ends is plain to see. Kiarostami’s hybrid casting in Close-Up goes further and makes any comfortable distinction between performance and documentary almost useless. The real people involved in Hossein Sabzian’s impersonation of filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf replay events from their own lives, producing a film in which reconstruction becomes another route into the emotional reality of what happened rather than a contaminant of it. 

This seems particularly important in documentary portraiture because the desire to find someone’s “real self” can easily become an act of editorial arrogance. It assumes that the filmmakers can see through the subject better than they can see themselves, stripping away statements deemed inauthentic until the supposedly authentic person underneath has been uncovered. Filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, who argues stridently that "to use an image is to enter fiction", offers a much more interesting conception of representation when she talks about “speaking nearby” rather than speaking about somebody, wherein the filmmaker acknowledges the gap between themselves and the subject rather than using filmmaking to close it. Meaning is deliberately prevented from becoming complete and the person represented retains some ability to contradict the representation, presenting no definitive version of the multifarious subject. I like this as an idea of editing, as the timeline constantly encourages closure. Every narrative instinct pushes towards the satisfying moment where disparate information suddenly locks together and the audience understands who this person really is. But perhaps the editor of a portrait occasionally has the opposite responsibility to protect the gaps whereby the audience can determine the meaning of contradictions and inconsistencies for themselves.

Documentary is often described through John Grierson’s famous formulation as the “creative treatment of actuality”, yet the creative half of that formulation often seems to become subordinate to the fear of mishandling the actuality. Of course there are ethical reasons for this fear, the editor possesses terrifying power. We can alter sequence, emphasis, duration and context and manufacture causation - even  making an ordinary pause appear accusatory. A responsible documentary practice has to recognise those dangers. But responsibility does not require aesthetic timidity. Sometimes the fear of manipulating reality produces the pretence that reality can be transferred intact, which is a distortion in itself.

In Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon, the temptation to resolve Douglas was always available because Douglas continually offers explanations of himself. He is simultaneously subject, critic, narrator and occasionally aspiring director. He even tells Finlay what the film ought to reveal: “the things that people don’t know which are important to [him]". The working-class boy from Maryhill becomes the Turner Prize-winning artist, who becomes the provocative celebrity artist, who becomes the father, who becomes the son worrying about the death of his mother, who becomes the performer aware of the camera, who becomes the exhausted man after the performance, who then notices that the exhausted man is being filmed and turns him into another performance. If you tried to decide which one was singularly authentic, you could spend the rest of your life editing the film.

There is a moment in the film when Douglas says he can behave as if he is an actor even though he isn’t one, stating plainly that he knows where there is a stage and he performs.  This could be received as a warning about his unreliability as a documentary subject. I think it’s closer to an instruction about how to look at subjects under a lens. The goal of a portrait needn’t be to penetrate the performances until the definitive person finally appears - there isn’t one. There are personas, deceptions, self-deceptions, evasions, confessions, contradictions, roles, responsibilities, jokes, tricks, mythologies and moments when several of these things seem to occupy the same space at the same time. A documentary shouldn’t collapse these various aspects into some artificial simplification, but instead revel in the strange complexity of human performance.


More on documentary performance:

Robert Greene made a list of the 20 greatest documentary performers

Douglas Gordon had a fabulous premiere at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele for the 76th Berlinale.
Following on from that was a selection of very enthusiastic reviews:

“Decidedly low-fi, loud, brash and clearly intentionally chaotic but with a clear narrative arc, crafted by editor Kieran Gosney” — Vladan Petkovic, Cineuropa
“Seamlessly interweaves spontaneous actions, everyday moments, and performative poses… the rigorous condensation of hundreds of hours of footage heightens the inner tension of the deliberately raw visuals” — Lida Bach, Moviebreak.de
"...the most significant film at the Berlinale... The film captivated my senses and left me inconsolably excited" — Martin Razhdashki in Atrakcia
“Watch this extraordinary film full of music… wonderful!” — Tue Steen Müller, filmkommentaren.dk
“The director has gone deep into the belly of the beast… as close as you can come to watching a major artist in full flow.” — Geoffrey Macnab, Business Doc Europe
“Moments of authenticity and directness… that hardly any film at this Berlinale has reached.” — Art in Berlin
“Quite surprising, intimate, and avant-garde… its resonance is profound.” — Kim Hyo-jeong, film critic


Political battles and the furore over Berlinale’s piss-poor stance on the ongoing genocide of Palestinians (free Palestine, obviously) meant that the light shon more brightly on explicitly political films that spoke to currently identifiable issues in the news media (what people like to call “urgent” and I often think of as more “undeveloped”) leaving little focus for films like Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon. This film is, of course, also political - as all art is political - but in more subtle ways.

A working class Scottish artist, who broke barriers to become both infatuated and cursed by the gaze of the London-centric art world, battling with the documentation of his life and stuck within the whirling personas he’s built for himself, while the Intractable tug of competing responsibilities tears at him. Is it the crucible of great art for artists like Douglas to live a childlike libertarian art-life, as argued by Herbert Read in To Hell With Culture, or do Douglas’ responsibilities as a parent supersede that? What is our moral responsibility as observers of art, when the production of that art involves psychological toil and suffering? Should we let artists battle their demons in their studio as long as the product enhances the beauty of the world, or is there a duty of care to protect artists' minds from themselves?

I remember a context studies class in art college, in which the lecturer criticised the idea that art must be born through suffering. We then proceeded to read an extract from Eat, Pray, Love… While I think art can be born from joy as well as suffering, I countered by saying I would rather read Ernest Hemingway or Sylvia Plath than Elizabeth Gilbert, and frankly it’s like comparing apples and apple-flavoured bubblegum. Is suffering a necessity? No, but frequently the drive to create great art gets tangled in the vines of self-destruction, and sometimes that’s the only path it can take. This is the most intimate politics of art, because when you walk into a gallery to marvel at a work of art, you might be witnessing the psychological torment of a real individual. Although the shared distress might lessen your own, you get to exit through the gift shop and go home - the artist’s pain is still up there on the plinths and walls, and in their mind, forever.

I don’t know the answer to any of this, but I know that Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon depicts these questions in a fresh and dynamic vision, and gets underneath the polished exterior of modern art in ways that an endless parade of artist documentaries, magazine articles and biographies have papered over with platitudes. The punk attitude of the film against those platitudes is political in itself, as I see the art world threatened by not just economic destruction, but the destruction of the complexity and radical empathy which is at its core - replaced with simplification, commodification and authoritarianism.

I’m glad “art is political” was the rallying cry that came out of Berlinale, but I worry about the idea that art must wear politics on its sleeve. If all art is political, we need to find ways to articulate politics not just through explicit messaging, but also through poetry, surreality, abstraction, and contradiction - or any other indirect route through hearts and minds. The purest art is in conveying the ineffable, and the endless 24 hour news cycle and social media tsunami shows us that explicit political messaging is persistently effable. There are political nuances to individual experience beyond the headlines. As individual pain and dehumanisation is the end result of the corruption and failure of politics, so then must the creative expression of the depth of that pain and human experience be considered of equal ‘urgency’ as the direct critique of the politics that led them there.

During the editing of Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon, I found three principles from Douglas' art mirrored my own work: gathering, noticing and discovery. Like much of Douglas' art, these principles start from a simple basis, but lead the mind off on circuitous paths to the profound. In a monologue near the beginning of the film, Douglas explains his studio as a locus of artistic gathering, most visible in the form of words and phrases scribbled on his studio kitchen wall - for example "west end girls", "they got what they deserved" and perhaps the crux of the film "close your eyes, see how it feels". These scraps of meaning are pulled from conversations around his kitchen table and, as Douglas explains, might become significant pieces in neon or "in a form that hasn't been invented yet." These words and phrases sit in his head and on his walls, their significance not yet fulfilled, until something clicks and they become the basis for visual art, a process that Douglas says can take decades. This act of noticing the insignificant and making it significant becomes important later in the film, when Douglas expresses the influence of the repeated sample at the core of the composition Jesus Blood Never Failed Me by Gavin Bryars. Douglas says this exemplifies the practice of noticing - in this case, Bryars’ attention to the plaintive singing of a man living rough in London. The singing, from someone ignored by society, becomes the centre point of orchestral arrangement, the voice and the person singing becoming significant.

These processes of noticing and gathering are the two steps along a path of discovery, which Douglas expresses as a kind of oneiric mind state in opposition to excessive rationality imposed by some elements of society, in a diatribe against a "psy-fucking-chia-fucking-trist" who once said he was "living in a dreamworld". There's an obvious absurdity in criticising a conceptual artist for living in a dreamworld, and I think the audience is probably sympathetic to Douglas when he says that he went to art school "to say fuck you" to such people, those who don't take a chance on "discovery".

In the edit, the image chosen to convey Douglas' mindset at this point in the film was a red boat bobbing on the water from his 1995 video artwork Remote Viewing 13.05.94 (Horror Movie). When I first saw this work amongst the archive, I was struck by its power but couldn't articulate exactly why I found it so stirring. When constructing this particular sequence, however, the image seemed to contain the right conceptual and emotional meaning to communicate the mind of Douglas at that stage of the story. A vivid but lonely object, held but still moving, on an unknown body of shimmering water. It comes within a montage of Douglas' work (bloodshot eyes, a deliriously strobing Glasgow chip shop, red curtains blowing, fingers beckoning) which aims to sync up the viewer’s mind with that of Douglas at this key moment in his emotional journey. Crucially, these images appear not as a reference to a specific phase of Gordon's practice (their chronology and origin undefined) but function purely as emotional and psychological storytelling devices. The means by which I came upon these images and selected it for this purpose was the process of gathering, noticing and discovery.

This is essentially what editing is, or should be. You gather material, in this case the collective video work of Douglas Gordon, you watch it over and over and try to notice what significance lies behind the presentation, how it makes you feel and think in the moment and across the editing process, and you open yourself to the Gordonian sense of discovery. You often just throw things against the timeline and see what sticks - similar to how, in the film, Douglas drops a lightbulb, which won’t screw into its socket, that smashes against a mirror on the floor in a moment of sudden and improvisational creative destruction that surprises even him.

A more conventional edit might use the red boat to illustrate a specific period or style of Douglas' work. Maybe the red boat meant something to Douglas when he made it and could elucidate his working life when he created this image or chart the course of his artistic development? I don’t find that particularly interesting or dramatic. What can be dramatic, though, is to follow Douglas' state of mind through the course of the film's conflicts - at this point, he is at the end of his tether, stuck between rational responsibilities and the creative chaos of his art, and a few scenes later he's going to declare he no longer wants to continue to live life this way - and use associative imagery as emotionally expressive beats that add weight to his words, not simply explain or illustrate them. As Douglas states, the psy-fucking-chia-fucking-trist (representative of anyone who ever stood in the way of his artistic impulse) needs to "go to sleep" and "ask themselves who [they] are". The audience needs to do the same, to go with Douglas into the limbic land of associative waking dreams that forms the crucible of his art.

Dreaming is the most pure gathering, noticing and discovery that we're capable of - our brain surprises itself with images and sounds from our waking life and reconfigures them into a new order that may allow us to process our emotions and actions in ways that our conscious mind prevents us. Fellini once said in an interview for Rolling Stone that “talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams... that solemn, almost religious ritual of stepping into the realm of visions, as when you go to sleep and start to dream." When editing is closer to a dream state than a waking state, a film can open up in miraculous ways, as the audience is given associative free rein to react, connect and question the visuals without being tethered to some rational course of images, events or explanation. For me, the rational world of the psy-fucking-chia-fucking-trist is this anchor of factual editing holding down so much documentary; so afraid of the risks of open discovery that it would rather bore an audience into an obedient stupor than bore into the empathetic mind of subject and viewer.

I felt the red boat needed to be there because listening to Douglas' words and looking at the red boat on the water made me feel like I believe Douglas' felt when he said the word “discovery”. Douglas likely wasn't thinking of a red boat when he said the word, but when I hear him say it and see the red boat I feel as if I can think like Douglas. Although there's a nudge in a direction from the succession of images, their rhythm and prominence, as well as the associated speech, there's no intention that every viewer should feel exactly the same way. The image and its partners could strike them differently, and that's not only fine but desirable.

A thought that recurred often during this edit was how little I cared for the overwhelming majority of documentaries about artists. I have only ever seen a small handful of such films that come close to the experience of the art itself. Great artists exist in a world of pure subjective expression, a fascinating place they invite us to enter where we simultaneously try to connect with their mind and go deeper into our own. But what are the three most common modes in art documentaries? Either sit down interviews, the realistic representation of the artist at work in actuality/archive, or a series of appeals to authority from experts and familiars - usually some mixture of all three. While these techniques can be illuminating, they are often supposed to reach some kind of profundity through sheer accumulation, but end up feeling like a celebratory confetti of facts to distract the audience from realising they haven’t experienced anything of substance. It's like being walked into a gallery and having your head thrust straight at the blurb on the walls. Turn your head instead to any portrait in that gallery and you’ll see a poetic rendering of the external that exposes the internal, not the presentation of the external in and of itself.

Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon is not just a portrait of the artist as we see him, but also of his way of thinking, feeling and looking - a vision of what Douglas sees when he closes his eyes. His work is never deployed to explain or historicise, but summoned when it can immerse us in his psychology or convey his emotions. When Douglas is asked why he does the things he does - burn, destroy, copy and manipulate - it isn't Finlay the director that asks, or some academic insight from a talking head, but Douglas' daughter. The answer he gives isn't as an artist, but as a father. When Douglas and Finlay argue about the making of the film, we don't hear from someone else as to Douglas' temper and complex relationship with the documentation of his life, we see Douglas blowing children's bubbles out the window and cut to archive of him taping his face into distortion for his 1996 piece The Making of Monster. That's the film trying to get into your head through Douglas' head. The film is about, as Douglas says, "the things people don't know that are important to [him]", and what is important to the subject of a documentary is not, despite its dominance in the form, the facts of their lives, but rather the inner workings of their mind and perception.

Ask yourself what you would most like the world to understand about you, and I'm sure you won't think of some fact that can be observed externally, but will instead land on some thought or feeling that, although significant to your sense of self, you struggle to have acknowledged by others. This, I think, is what Douglas is playing with when he harangues Finlay at the start of the film about not knowing his middle name, or the day of the week he was born. He knows full well that far too many documentaries, as suspenseful and sensational as they can be, are obsessed with a logical sequencing of events and the supposed clarity of external observations - closer to a dramatic reading of Wikipedia than true cinema. What people don't know, and what I truly believe they long for in non-fiction as they do in fiction, is the answer to a question Douglas loves to be asked - "what did you dream?" The answer is inevitably a boat ride of discovery.

With Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon premiering at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival in Panorama Dokumente, I’m excited to see how audiences respond to this shared dream state.

I've always thought that director Eilidh Munro made a fabulous film with A Long Winter. A brave and uncompromising look at the realities of human control over their environment that confronts the viewer with things they'd rather ignore. It hadn't taken hold in the festival market though, perhaps due to that harsh reality on-screen (although there's no violence per-se, there is extremely bloody scenes of cutting up deer corpses) or the difficult and stoic central character. So it was a surprise that it was nominated for a BAFTA, and an even greater surprise that it actually won, particularly with such stiff competition in the widely acclaimed Clean and multi-BAFTA winning animators Ainslie Henderson and Will Anderson's Shackleton.

I was absolutely thrilled, as it felt like a vindication of all the tough decisions that Eilidh made to create a film that resisted the standard documentary formula and all the recent trends in documentary that I find so tiresome: 'likeable' characters, explanation over immersion, ever-present voiceover, directors inserting themselves in the story, and surface-level thematics.

I hope this win gives the film a new jolt of life and more people are able to see it. It stands as one of my favourite editing experiences and, along with Crannog - with which it shares similar qualities - one of the short films I'm most proud of working on.

The Herald has picked out The Hermit of Treig as one of the best Scottish films of 2022 alongside Charlotte Wells' Aftersun and Hassan Nazers' Winners. 

"For this fascinating documentary about solitude and, ultimately, friendship, Oban-based restaurateur-turned-filmmaker Lizzie MacKenzie turns her camera on Ken Smith, the hermit of the title, who has lived off-grid lived for years in a log cabin in Lochaber. The filming period was lengthy and took in the period of Covid lockdowns – not that they affected Smith much – so it was only this year that MacKenzie’s film finally saw the light of day in its finished form, winning the Audience Award at the 2022 Glasgow Film Festival in March."

Check out the trailer below

After winning the Audience Award at the Glasgow Film Festival, The Hermit of Treig has scooped the Best Single Documentary award at the 2022 Scottish Baftas.

Producer Naomi Spiro and Director Lizzie McKenzie gave charming acceptance speeches which you can view here

​I had the great pleasure of working with Cinetopia and artist Yulia Kovanova to create a three-screen looped film for the installation I Ken Whaur, which premiered at the French Institute in Edinburgh and is set to tour the country in the new year.

We worked with the National Library of Scotland's vast video archive of documentary and amateur film depicting the work and daily lives of Scottish islanders and highlanders, from as early as the 1910's all the way up to the 1980's. The film evokes the connection between the land, the people and their language, focusing on how the clearances and later population decline affected the communities.

The hybrid documentary animated feature A Cat Called Dom, which I edited, has won the Powell & Pressburger Award for Best Film at the 2022 Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Considering the competition, it was quite a surprise, and the positive reactions to the film have been really great to read and hear. 


This is what the jury had to say about the film:

“It’s better to miss Naples than to hit Margate” was Powell & Pressburger’s motto, suggesting the imagination, daring, risk taking and wit that marked their films. Their special collaboration was also grounded in deeply human stories and the belief that life can be magic.

For these reasons the jury are pleased to award The Powell & Pressburger Award for Best Feature to Will Anderson & Ainslie Henderson’s A Cat Called Dom."

Accepting the award, directors Anderson and Henderson said:

​“To screen our first feature at EIFF was an honor… but to take away the first Powell & Pressburger Award is just so special. A Cat Called Dom is a film about embracing failure… after EIFF it now feels much more like a success.”

The Oil Machine directed by Emma Davie will premiere at Sheffield DocFest 2022 on June 25th

From Screen Scotland:

​The Oil Machine explores our economic, historical and emotional entanglement with oil by looking at the conflicting imperatives around North Sea oil. This invisible machine at the core of our economy and society now is now up for question as activists and investors demand change. Is this the end of oil?   

The Oil Machine reveals the hidden infrastructure of oil from the offshore rigs and the buried pipelines to its flow through the stock markets of London. As the North Sea industry struggles to meet the need to cut carbon emissions, oil workers see their livelihoods under threat, and investors seek to protect their assets. Meanwhile a younger generation of climate activists are catalysed by the signs of impending chaos, and the very real threat of global sea level rises. The Oil Machine explores the complexities of transitioning away from oil and gas as a society and considers how quickly can we do it?

I was the assistant editor on The Oil Machine

The Oil Machine is a Sonja Henrici Creates Production for BBC Scotland and supported by The National Lottery through Screen Scotland.

Sheffield DocFest Screenings:

• Sat 25 June 15:30-17.27 + Conversation (Showroom – Bertha DocHouse Screen 3)
• Mon 27 June 20:00-21.42 (Odeon – Screen 1)
• Tues 28 June 10:15-11:57 (Showroom -Bertha DocHouse Screen 3)