The Reel Deals

An article by CHITRA RAMASWAMY of Scotland on Sunday.

WHEN the Bafta Scotland nominations were announced last year, most of us – myself included – homed in on the fact that only one woman was nominated in the Best Actress category. While we were busy bemoaning the lack of women working in the Scottish screen industries, we failed to notice that the short film category was dominated by women filmmakers alone. More surprisingly, all three films were documentaries.

When Stuart Cosgrove, Channel 4's director of nations and regions, presented the short film award in November to Alice Nelson for Losing Myself: Annie, a tender study of dementia, he said: "This year's short dramas were blown away by documentaries. What we know is that a young and precociously talented group of women directors have dominated short film-making in Scotland. What we don't know is what they will achieve in the future."The future is already looking bright for Nelson, as well as the other nominees, Yasmin Fedda and Yulia Mahr, all three of whom live and work in Edinburgh.

This month Fedda's film set in a bakery in Gorgie, Breadmakers, is at Sundance. Meanwhile Mahr, whose documentary Butterfly tells the story of a Scots girl with albinism, is set to make her first feature documentary exploring the condition in Kenya.

Most exciting of all is Nelson's next project, The Ten New Commandments, which will see 10 Scottish directors, both established and emerging talents, each make a short documentary on a different article of the Human Rights Declaration to commemorate its 60th anniversary. Irvine Welsh, Douglas Gordon and Tilda Swinton are all set to be involved and it is hoped it will premiere at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival.

It's a genre that dates back to John Grierson, the Perthshire-born father of British documentary film, and his groundbreaking classics of the 1930s such as Night Mail. Like Grierson, many of the subjects this new wave of filmmakers are choosing stem from a commitment to social issues as opposed to the more salacious or faux-naif style of, say, Louis Theroux.

"Documentary is really healthy in Edinburgh at the moment," says Nelson, who started out as an artist in Dublin before studying at Edinburgh College of Art. "I find that the people here who are making short films are really passionate, and that they're making work just for that reason. This documentary on human rights really shows that.

In Glasgow, television and drama is strong but in Edinburgh there's a growing community of documentary makers. I think women are really good at relating to a subject, and getting inside it."All the women filmmakers I speak to credit this renaissance to a small research centre at ECA, staffed by just three full-time members.

The Scottish Documentary Institute was set up in 2004 by ECA's head of film and television, Noe Mendelle, and in that short time it has transformed the landscape of documentary film in Scotland. Nelson, Fedda and Mahr have all come through the centre, and the SDI's Bridging The Gap scheme, which every year commissions filmmakers to submit short documentaries on a particular theme, is the only such initiative in the UK.

"It does seem like there is a new wave of female Scottish documentary makers," says Sonja Henrici, head of development at the SDI. "Last year, five out of six of the Bridging The Gap commissions went to women. They just had great projects. This year we have selected five talented women again, from across the UK. We're trying to nurture a community of filmmakers with a creative vision for cinematic documentaries and a knack for storytelling."It's the SDI that is behind The Ten New Commandments.

The masterclasses they run have been hosted by filmmakers from Nick Broomfield to Kim Longinotto. Both Fedda and Mahr's films were made thanks to being selected for Bridging The Gap and with funding from Scottish Screen and Skillset.

The commissioned directors get £8,000 in cash and another £8,000 in kind for equipment, as well as the support to make their films. Though it started off as Scotland-wide, it has proved so successful, with around 120 films being entered each year, that it has been opened up to the rest of Britain.

"Through the SDI you realise there is an opportunity to make documentaries and an audience for them," says 27-year-old Fedda. "Having a hub like that is really encouraging." Nelson tells me she ended up at the SDI when the National Film School turned her down because she wasn't deemed "documentary with a capital 'D'. I got to the final 12 but they thought I was too much on the periphery of documentary film, whereas at SDI their attitude was all about making good films and not caring what category they fell into. I loved that."Mahr, who started out as a theatre director and is making her Kenya-based feature with the Institute, agrees: "When I went to the SDI I hadn't done a single documentary, but that didn't matter. There are so many great people coming out of that place. I was absolutely stunned when I saw it was all documentaries on the Bafta shortlist."In Bridging The Gap's fourth year, in which Fedda and Mahr were chosen and the theme was 'white', there were four other documentaries – beautiful, understated works about ice fishing in a small depressed town in North Dakota, and the huge and disconcerting market for skin-lightening products amongst the Asian community in Britain.

The stories may be varied, but what all these documentaries have in common is a commitment to their subjects and their own visual language.Another SDI alumni is Astrid Bussink, now based in the Netherlands, whose 2005 ECA graduation film, The Angelmakers – made with the support of the Institute and the winner of the Grierson best newcomer award at EIFF – is now being made into a film starring Helen Mirren and John Hurt. It's an astonishing piece of work about a Hungarian village made famous in the 1920s when a number of women poisoned their husbands with arsenic. For the film, by the way, the action is moved to Yorkshire.Bussink's next film, The Lost Colony, which travels to the world's oldest monkey laboratory in the former Soviet Republic of Abkhazia, will premiere this week at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Her work may take her all over the world, but Bussink says she loves working in Scotland.

"It's a great place to make documentaries. Especially at the moment, there is so much new talent. I find Scotland very supportive of documentary-making, which makes it a great place to experiment, and that's how great films are made."