SOUTHSIDE FILM FESTIVAL 2012 | EVENTS
by Tom Fergus Arnott

I am in a small hand-built dome. The smell of varnish is fresh. I love it. The walls are white and the roof octagonal and a perplexing din of red and orange images are throwing themselves at me from a 1980's television set, while a wash of shapes and waves come from another set opposite. Projected onto the wall plays a short film by Kim Stewart entitled Stigma 6. Computerised women are wandering around a lunar complex in bathing suits, their bodies expanding and contracting. One is pregnant. She falls flat on her face, while another encounters a surgeon deciding to mark her with a red square rather than a circle on the side of her neck. What is going on? What are these women being classed as and why? And why is it they do not seem to mind until it is too late?

Furthermore…how did I get into this weird dome?

It is the final day of the Southside Film Festival and I've decided to spend the afternoon at Southside Studios in Govanhill. Walking up Allison St in the sun, people are standing outside their businesses chatting to each other in Urdu while groups of teenagers ride around mock-menacingly on bikes. The sweet scent of chicken and pakora is in the air and there's something homelike and welcoming about it.

The door opens and I'm beckoned in with a stranger. I trip over the bottom of the entrance and fall on my ass. It's an old stable entrance or something of the like and the door is raised above the ground. Nothing is quite as expected. I'm led along long corridors past various machines, tools, slabs of wood, and marked off rooms. Jenny, my guide, is also being followed by a group of small children who seem to be very much enjoying themselves.

In the dome, Gwenan Davies Take These Lips and Hold Me Fast charming little tribute to the songwriter, Gene Pitney plays. As does Dave McNeil's Freudenvoller, which presents a strange, hallucinogenic, eyeball-popping picture of what appears a particularly rough Saturday night on the Glasgow Underground.

My personal favourite out of the films shown today at the studio is Stina Wirfelt's Tame Time. It is a genuinely funny and touching portrait of an old woman living in the East End seeing her local area in the early stages of an urban redevelopment scheme. While the neighbourhood has fallen apart through disrepair and fire, the idea of rebuilding comes from without and seems not to involve her community. Glossy urban planning brochures begin to seem threatening with their pictures of "healthy-looking people" everywhere. We see no faces in this film, only pictures of the area shot in the present juxtaposed with out-of-date Google Earth images. This clearly provides an interior and exterior perception of place. The film manages to indicate tensions that inadvertently over time work to exclude residents from where they live.

Moving on from the exhibition, I also had a chance over the festival to see Class Struggle: Film From the Clyde and The Southside Filmmakers Award Screening. In both cases I'm struck by the relatively low turn-out. In fact, speaking to local residents in a coffee shop in Shawlands, very few people have heard about any film festival going on. This is a great shame considering the standard of much of the weekend's events and the kind of community atmosphere the festival seeks to tap into. I was double booked the day the film about Bernadette Devlin, Notes From a Political Journey, was showing. Devlin was the Irish MP first elected at age 21 famous for, among other things, wearing mini-skirts to the Commons and hooking Reginald Maudling in the schnoz. Having more than one film of great politico-cultural calibre on at the same time made the weekend seem all the more a proper festival, but at the same the seeming lack of hand-distributed advertisements around is worrying.

Highlights from the award screening included Abdellatif Faithi's Our Journey, a film about the difficulties young asylum seekers in Glasgow face in the fear of deportation at age 18 and about the hardships encountered reaching Britain. In contrast, Charlotte Carden's cadaver-kicking slapstick comedy, The Taxidermist defies taste with a grin and a couple of very funny performances.

Cinema Action's Film From the Clyde provides unique insight into the UCS work-in of 1971-72 in which workers from four Clyde shipyards took successful action against Government plans to scrap one of those yards and make a severe number of lay-offs. The film lets the workers speak for themselves and does nothing to interfere. In a particularly striking moment we see work performed at the bottom of a ship with next to no light or safety equipment. Workers show off injuries, and communicate with each other by lip-reading, as there is no way to hear anything over the noise of the welding.

Jimmy Cloughley, the shop steward who headed the publicity for the work-in spoke eloquently about the spirit of those times after the film showing. Cloughley was involved in not only letting the activist filmmaker Ann Guedes into the yards, but also arranging for the UCS to fund the film. Quoting Jimmy Reid, he said with regard to job cuts "One day they cut off your arms, the next they cut off your legs. They then tell you to stand on your own two feet."

The film has only recently been retrieved from the BFI and circulated. For anyone interested in the history of the Trade Union movement or Glaswegian history it is a great social document to have around. Ann Guedes, who made the film, was a veteran of the revolutionary events of Paris in 1968 and was deported shortly afterwards, leading to her work in Britain.

The Southside Film Festival is a great way to meet people, find out about artistic projects on your doorstep and also a chance to see a bunch of interesting films you probably wouldn't otherwise.

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