Circles and Lines

On the windows of Cineworld at Fountainpark. After I'd spent the day finishing off images from last week's job, L and I went to the cinema in the evening to see a couple of films in the Film Festival. The first was a wonderful documentary called The Farthest about the Voyager missions. The story was told in the words of the scientists involved in the project, some of them now in their seventies and eighties. Interesting how many women there were up on screen. That might have been a result of the selections made by the director in choosing from the hundreds of hours of footage they had, or it might have been a reflection of the number of women scientists that were involved, not sure. So many great stories - it felt like the two hour film could spawn tens of other similar documentaries to explore some of the things that were only touched on as the film told the story from before the launches of Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 in 1977 on to the present day when they are still travelling out into space, farther than any man-made object has every been. A great film, about the time when people on Earth still did these sorts of things. When the Voyagers were launched it was just five years since the last man walked on the moon. No one has been back since, that last visitor, Eugene Cernan, died earlier this year and the remaining six men who have walked on the surface of an astronomical body other than the earth are all in their eighties. I'd definitely recommend the film - informative, enlightening, funny, poignant, everything a documentary can be. The director and editor were there for a Q&A afterwards which gave a bit more insight into the work involved in putting it together. 
The other film also included an element of real-life events although it was a fictionalised account. Did it fall between two stools - not completely factual, not completely made-up? Called The Last Photograph, it was sort of about Lockerbie, although told through just one story, about one passenger on the plane. A story about a father losing his son. It was the world premiere of the film and director/actor (father), writer and actor (son) were all there for a Q&A, along with ITV news anchor Alastair Stewart, whose real coverage of Lockerbie featured in the film's flashback sequences. The last question of the Q&A seemed to touch on something that I felt too - what about the women in the film? Too much soft-focus male gaze of the young girlfriend, a (deliberate - the director said so) lack of explanation of the personal story of the woman who listens to the father's story when it all becomes too much. Two women thieves. A missing mother. All a very male world. Which is fine, for writer and director, who are men, to explore their world, their way. But it also felt weak at times - some of the dialogue and the story-telling seemed to lack sophistication and nuance. And there was a nagging thought throughout - why attach this story to Lockerbie? Why link this piece of fiction to this real-life event? The writer seemed to say he had come up with the idea - about losing a son - as it was his own worst fear and only later, having looked around at possible ideas, attached it to Lockerbie. But maybe that was just me. There was a former Lockerbie policeman in the audience who spoke at the Q&A and commended the film-makers on what they had achieved in portraying the events of that time.