Lots of yesterdays

I spent a fascinating couple of hours this morning with Kay Foubister of the Moving Image Archive, part of the National Library of Scotland which is  based in the converted Kelvin Hall, and my old  friend David Bruce, who was at one time Director of the Scottish Film Council.

David had contacted me some weeks ago to say that Kay was wanting to talk with me about the Cinema Sgire tape archive which was now in her keeping.  

Cinema Sgire was a project I directed in Uist from 1977 to 1980 which  made videos (in Gaidhlig and English)  with the local communities as well as run a cinema circuit across the Western Isles.   It was , in its time, ground breaking and it also give rise to the Celtic Media Festival which is - more than forty years later - still going strong.

Kay sent me a list of the tapes they had been given  and the descriptions  rang a few bells.   I also managed to find  amongst my own papers what must be the last surviving copy of my final report on the project (in typescript) but nothing prepared me for the exciting and moving experience of actually laying my hands on these tapes after so long.   

The titles did bring back many memories  (some are even  in my own hand writing) and I hope to be able to help the Archive attract money to allow the tapes (on half inch open reel) to be digitised and preserved, and then to find a way to make them of relevance to the communities which made them, and perhaps more widely.

My extra photos are of that final report, as well as of one of the documents that  Comhairle Nan Eilean Siar  and the successor of the Film Council have been able to find in their archives. 

Next year will be 45 years since  I was appointed to start and run the project (interviews in Stornoway in August of that year I think)  and it is quite moving to think that these have survived, and are being cared for again, after all that time.