Projects in genres: Scottish

Synopsis

William always wanted to be a gangster. He turns his paper round into a racket and soon he's living like a 'made guy'. Just like in the mob movies he loves though, things quickly get out of control.

Synopsis

Based on Richard Jobson's acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, Sixteen Years of Alcohol  is a gritty tale of one man's inner journey of self-discovery as he escapes from the tyranny of the past and tries to come to terms with an identity forged in violence and betrayal.

Synopsis

Two American Mafiosi, Gino and Settimo, take refuge in the Glasgow café owned by their Scots/Italian cousin. But cousin Roberto isn't the tough guy they'd expected. His strengths are fish frying and stamp collecting, and he thinks Magnum 45s are a type of ice cream.

Gino and Settimo try to repay Roberto's hospitality by chasing off a debt collector who wants his property, but their strong-arm tactics alarm him, and he realises they aren't the PR consultants they claimed to be.

Adding to the tension is a growing rivalry between Roberto and Gino over Alice, a girl Roberto has secretly loved for years. Matters come to a head when Roberto finds a suitcase full of plants, which he assumes to be drugs. He's disgusted with his cousins, until Settimo reveals that the cuttings are from a new species of vine, which can grow anywhere and is set to revolutionise the wine industry.

Meanwhile, Roberto has finally worked up the courage to tell Alice how he feels. But before he can act his world starts to fall apart. Firstly he finds her in a passionate embrace with Gino, then his beloved Grandfather dies, and finally the Ukrainian gangsters track down the Americans and lay siege to the shop. The situation seems hopeless until Roberto comes up with a place of safety then sets fire to the shop. Within minutes the emergency services have arrived and the Ukrainians have made a hasty retreat.

The next day, as smoke rises from the ruins of his precious café, Roberto tells Alice he loves her. She says she loves him too, and that the kiss with Gino had been a drunken mistake. But their happiness is short lived. The debt-collector who the Americans have chased off returns mob-handed, and he's out for revenge.

Roberto stands up to him and is bundled into a car, but just at that moment a fleet of taxis pulls up. They contain the cream of Gino and Settimo's New Jersey family, who have decamped to Scotland to avoid being wiped out in a gangland war. The sight of 30 steely-eyed Mafiosi soon convinces the debt collector to make himself scarce.

Five years later the ruins of Roberto's café have been transformed into a magnificent new restaurant. Next door the Americans have built an impressive warehouse from which they run the Caledonian Chianti Company. And the wasteland in front of the shop has become a beautiful vineyard, with rows of plants as far as the eye can see.

Synopsis

Sometimes you wake up with the wrong person. Black Coffee, a brilliantly improvised Scottish black comedy, deals with the hangover from the night before. John Dick wakes up, content with being unemployed. Lynn, an insecure rich bitch, finds herself falling in love with John, the 'journalist for the local paper'. Meanwhile, after years of marriage, Pat has had enough of Eve's too many late nights, leaving their teenage son, Ben, with the biggest hangover of all.

Synopsis

'ET from Hell via Southpark'.

Furry Story is the humorous, engaging and very irreverent story of a fractious family, a little girl and her imaginary anarchic friend, Fredglob, who brings chaos and anarchy to their lives.

In this series pilot, the family's daughter Janey removes her petulant parents, with the help of her pet goblin and his wild schemes.

Synopsis

Landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy is renowned throughout the world for his work in ice, stone, wood. His own remarkable still photographs are Goldsworthy's way of talking about his often ephemeral works, of fixing them in time. Now with this deeply moving film, shot in four countries, across four seasons, and the first major film he has allowed to be made, the elusive element of time adheres to his sculpture.

Director Thomas Riedelsheimer worked with Andy Goldsworthy for over a year to shoot this film. What Riedelsheimer found was a profound sense of breathless discovery and uncertainty in Goldsworthy's work, in contrast to the stability of conventional sculpture. There is risk in everything that Goldsworthy does. He takes his fragile work - and it can be as fragile in stone as in ice or twigs - right to the edge of its collapse, a very beautiful balance and a very dramatic edge within the film. The film captures the essential unpredictability of working with rivers and with tides, feels into a sense of liquidity in stone, travels with Goldsworthy underneath the skin of the earth and reveals colour and energy flowing through all things.

Riedelsheimer's film, like Goldsworthy's sculpture, grows into something beyond the simple the making of an object. It touches the heart of what Goldsworthy does and who he is, in much the same way that Goldsworthy touches the heart of a place when he works in it and leaves his mark on it. In this film, which is Goldsworthy's work as much as Riedelsheimer's, 'you see something you never saw before; that was always there but you were blind to.'

Synopsis

A drugs-dealer double-crosses and kills a drugs trafficker in the remote West Coast of Scotland. The dealer gets arrested and finds out he was seen by a couple of local people. Sitting on remand facing life imprisonment, with only two unnamed witnesses from the one street hamlet of Bartoun standing between him and freedom he decides to hire a hitman to kill all the potential witnesses.

Outside a rural police station the hitman starts a stopwatch, jumps into his car and sets off down the road. He drives at full speed through the barren country roads until he pulls up in Bartoun. He jumps out of the car and stops the stopwatch. It reads 28 minutes 36 seconds.

At noon the next day the hitman strides down Main Street, pulls out two handguns and starts shooting. Once his intial attack is over he starts his stopwatch, sets 28 minutes 36 seconds, counting down. This is how much time he has to kill everyone in the village before the police can possibly get there. Pandemonium follows within the village as he methodically hunts down his targets and people frantically try to stay alive.

Synopsis

Set in a steamy Glasgow of the early 1950s, the film focuses on the existential crisis of Joe (Ewan McGregor), a rootless young drifter who finds work on a barge owned by the down-to-earth Les (Peter Mullan) and his enigmatic wife Ella (Tilda Swinton). One afternoon Joe and Les happen upon a corpse of a young woman floating in the water. Accident? Suicide? Murder?

As the police investigate the case and a suspect is arrested, it becomes evident that Joe knows more about the drowned woman than he is letting on. Meanwhile, against the background of this mysterious death and the 'murder' investigation, Joe and Ella embark on an intimate and passionate affair.
 
Tim Cumming, writing in The Guardian, 8 August 2003:
Alexander Trocchi was the smack-addled icon of beat literature, whose writings have been eclipsed by a lurid life of porn, pimping and dissolution in New York, Paris and London. But with a new film out adapted from his novel Young Adam, the Glasgow-born writer's life and work are ripe for re-evaluation.

 
 

Synopsis

Frantic knockabout tragedy as Bobo is sent to clown prison for a daring but silly crime and must escape to try and prevent his family from bringing shame on all clowndom.

Synopsis

Set amongst the high rise estates of Glasgow, the home of many recently arrived asylum seekers as part of the government's dispersal programme. The drama begins during an apparently commonplace winter flu epidemic. But doctors are puzzled by the strange symptoms of this flu and cannot understand why it is only affecting a relatively small cross-section of the community. One asylum support unit worker is not satisfied by the flu argument and wonders if environmental health hazards are to blame. But when one man dies, the post mortem results reveal the shocking truth - the deadly germ anthrax killed him.

But even in the face of this evidence, the authorities are unwilling to believe what is becoming increasingly obvious - that north Glasgow has been subject to a silent and deadly terrorist attack. Someone has deliberately released anthrax amongst the immigrant community and the panic both inside and outside the hospital is mounting fast. Central to the drama is a Kurdish refugee, Sherko, and his 12 year old daughter, Resa. Sherko remembers the full horror of being gassed in northern Iraq by Saddam Hussein and now watches in horror as his daughter succumbs to the deadly infection.

Synopsis

A young mother's trust in mankind is challenged when she decides to help a stranger while on a long car journey through the barren landscape of her conflicting emotions and perceptions.

Synopsis

Charlie is on a stupid mission of revenge against the Popstar who stole his wife.

Vincente is on the run, trying to get away from the country to escape a contract castration ordered by the man who caught him in bed with his wife.

Charlie is probably the only person mad enough to give Vincente a lift to the remote Scottish airfield where he plans to fly to Spain.

From now on, little is certain as these two lost souls get more lost on their journey to their own private wilderness.