Margaret Tait, Orquil Burn, 1955. Courtesy of the Margaret Tait estate and LUX.
Event Details
Monday 6 May 2019
Heart of Hawick, Hawick
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival’s end-of-festival Film Walk is the first Margaret Tait 100 event to be held in the Scottish Borders. The event will bring together festival guests and ticket-holders for a walk in nearby Wilton culminating in a screening of Tait’s Orquil Burn (1955) in Wilton Dean Village Hall. Tait’s short has been described as a ‘voyage of exploration, on foot, up the length of an Orkney Burn, a walk which could be done in less than a day, but which, for the film, is spread and apportioned.’
Walkers will be joined for the occasion by writer/actor/director Gerda Stevenson, BAFTA-winning star of Tait’s Blue Black Permanent (1992), the first feature film made by a Scottish woman and the only feature film of Tait’s career. Stevenson will respond to Orquil Burn with a new poem specially commissioned by Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival.
Gerda will also be giving her talk Quiet Defiance at the festival on Sunday 5 May.