Happy Lands now on tour

As part of the Glasgow Film Festival, that recently finished, the hugely successful premiere of The Happy Lands took place. Indeed, so successful was the film, that an extra (third) screening had to be added!  The film is a unique collaboration between many hundreds of volunteers from the Fife coalfield communities and Theatre Workshop Scotland.  It tells the story of the 1926 General Strike and the subsequent miners’ lockout as it impacts on a pit town in Fife. More details are in a previous blog.

Dan Guthrie, miners leader,
confronts the pit supervisor

I reviewed the film in the Morning Star, here. And one of the points I made is that the film does not have a commercial distributor. This is because the distributors are unsure that the film will have an audience. Therefore the producers have started a roadshow (with the premiere) that is traveling to many coal mining and other areas in Scotland and the rst of Britain and being shown in halls and theatres as well as cinemas to try and  build up the level of support to take back to the distributors.

The details of this roadshow change frequently, but the list below is where things stand at present. Links to the venues for tickets (where appropriate) are included.

MARCH:

• FRI 1^st; BLANTYRE MINERS WELFARE blantyre miners welfare
• SUN 3^rd; PENICUIK CINEMA penicuik cinema
• SUN 10^th; EDEN COURT, INVERNESS eden-court. whats-on
• SUN 10^th; ADAM SMITH THEATRE, KIRKCALDY adam smith
• MON 11^th; ADAM SMITH THEATRE, KIRKCALDY (11.00 am)
• SAT 16^th; DURHAM MINERS, REDHILLS, Durham Miners
• MON 18^th; LOGANLEA MINERS WELFARE (Pitstop) loganleamw
• WED 20^th; GALA CINEMA. DURHAM gala durham
• FRI 22^nd; KIRKCONNELL MINERS MEMORIAL HALL – Dumfries Kirkconnel Miners
• TUE 26^th; SHEFFIELD SHOWROOM  sheffield showroom
• SUN 31^st; BONESS HIPPODROME  Boness Cinema

APRIL: 

• FRI 5^th; NATIONAL COAL MINING MUSEUM, WAKEFIELD, ncm
• SAT 13^th; LEICESTER PHOENIX ARTS CENTRE phoenix arts
• WED 24^th; CANTERBURY GULBENKIAN Gulbenkian Kent
• FRI 26^th;  COLINSBURGH COMMUNITY CINEMA, FIFE cccinema

• 21-28; BEIJING INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL bjiff

MAY:

• WED 1^st; RIVERSIDE STUDIOS, HAMMERSMITH, LONDON riverside studios
• SUN 5^th; DCA Dundee dca

If you are around any of these venues when the film is being shown, I can heartily recommend it. Why not get along, have a great night, and increase the pressure on commercial distributors to give The Happy Lands a mainstream release?

His humanity makes McCullin’s photos so iconic

Don McCullin in the biopic

To make a movie about a stills photographer sounds as though the producer has chosen an entirely inappropriate medium. But Jacqui and David Morris’ film about Don McCullin (McCullin, 2012 - see trailer here)  proves that not only can it be done, but it should be done.

The biography/showcase for the (now 77-year-old) creator of iconic imagery that focuses  on the horrors of war and violence, is a huge success. It interweaves the images themselves - many of which you will have seen - with (mainly) interviews with only two people; McCullin himself, and Harold Evans, his editor at the Sunday Times Magazine for 14 years. (Evans himself, is of course no slouch at identifying a good news photo, as he proved with his 1997 book, Pictures on a Page.

The Guv'nors of Seven Sisters' Road

What was the secret of the success of a photographer who was brought up in the impoverished surroundings of Finsbury Park, North London and who first came to attention with photos of his gang member mates? 

As most photographers who have concentrated on the horrors of war and conflict, McCullin has been criticised as a ‘voyeur’ - someone to whom the photograph is more important than the suffering.  While McCullin admits his propensity to become a ‘war junkie’ increased along with his travels, the reality is more complex than that. Starting in Berlin, the Congo and Cyprus in the early sixties, his journeys read like a history of the late twentieth century conflicts - Congo, Cyprus, Biafra, Vietnam (many times), Cambodia, Northern Ireland, and Lebanon, where he documented the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Perhaps Thatcher did him a kind of backhanded favour when her government refused him permission to travel to the Falklands.

One of McCullin's first assignments -
Cyprus

But plenty of war photographers have recorded the same problems - not one has had the same impact as McCullin. Partly this is because of his humanity. His best photos are of the innocent sufferers of war; the civilians caught in the cross fire, the children left to die, the wounded soldiers. He bears witness to their plight, and tells us again and again what a savage waste it is.

But it is not just that. It is - I think - because his roots, grounded in working class London, have given him an empathy with these sufferers. He himself points out that it is always the poor, who can’t get away from conflict, who provide these subjects.

And of course, his eye to frame the picture brings its key point - the humanity - to the viewer. 

Lebanon was his final war. He now lives quietly in Somerset trying to exorcise the ‘vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain.’ as fellow photographer Kevin Carter wrote in his suicide note. 

The film is a fitting record of his life and work, and balances the still and the moving image with particular skill. Anyone interested in news, photography or even the fight against war, should see it. It continues at the GFT until Thursday (10 Jan).