Projects in genres: Scottish

Synopsis

AD 575 - A shipwrecked maiden, Henini, must marry the mercenary Chieftain Cathen, but on her way to him she is kidnapped by the Angle tribesman Aedgar, who sees she has land, money and a troublesome entourage. She is carrying a holy relic to Scotland and must safely deposit the bones of St Andrew to Saint Mungo. However before she can do this Fingal, the warrior is assigned to give her safe passage - a journey which leads to her abduction and entrapment in a nunnery. Can Fingal save her?

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Davie Morgan is a marriage counsellor on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

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An unemployed swashbuckler despairs of ever taking to the waves again in this peculiar bittersweet comedy.

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Then and Now tells the story of a family from Iraq who left their home and came to live in Scotland five years ago. Mohammed, the father, was an officer in the Iraqi army. The programme tells how he was smuggled into Kurdistan as his wife and daughter escaped by another route. After a year waiting in a refugee camp in Turkey they were finally accepted as refugees in the U.K.

Synopsis

When Amy, Larry and Tom stay overnight in a 'haunted' house they know what to expect: The usual ghosts and things that go bump in the night. It's disappointing when all they discover is an old building with dry rot. Amy's about to give up, but sets out to discover the truth about the house.

Synopsis

Why are so many Scots throwing off their clothes in wild abandon to embrace the mad midges and chilly climates of Scotland? Because it's liberating! These bodies wrinkled or smooth, plump or slender just want to be free to breathe in the open air. The last taboo has been broken and old fashioned 'textiles' will have to like it or lump it.

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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.

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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.

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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.'