Beyond the North Winds: A Post Nuclear Reverie

Director: Natalie Cubides-Brady

Year: 2023

A sci-fi city symphony inspired by London’s Great Smog of 1952. Created from archive footage, the film unfolds through fictional letters from a post-apocalyptic future. The film invites us to understand the smog in the context of the present-day climate emergency and our global destiny. Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2023 - Short Film Competition - World premiere Official Selection Uppsala Short Film Festival 2023

Director: Natalie Cubides-Brady

Year: 2016

Filmed around the time of Hugo Chavez’s last presidential election, this film focuses on the life of Carmen, the filmmaker’s aunt, who works as a shop assistant in Caracas, Venezuela. Combining observational and poetic documentary techniques, the film follows Carmen’s everyday life in the city in the run up to the election, against a backdrop of rousing political speeches and grand social promises. Offering an intimate portrait of both Carmen and Caracas, the film reflects on the gaps between the rhetoric of Chavez’s government and ordinary lived experience. At its heart, Carmen Waits is a meditation on the ways in which myth, religion, faith and death interact with Chavez’s politics.

Director: Callum McCulloch-Nowlan

Year: 2026

Rob Beaton has been weaving tartan and tweed in the Scottish Borders since he was 14. Now 84, he is Scotland's oldest and longest-serving mill worker, operating 100-year-old traditional shuttle looms. With no apprentice to carry on his craft, the mill where he has worked for over four decades may soon be forced to close. But elsewhere in Scotland, a different story is unfolding. At another mill in Highland Perthshire, a young apprentice is learning the trade, and the ancient rhythms of the looms are being passed to a new generation. Once, Scotland's textile industry employed nearly 75% of the population. Today, that figure stands at just 0.2%. Against the backdrop of that decline, the stories of these two mills paint a portrait of an industry at a crossroads. Through his film, Callum McCulloch-Nowlan celebrates the workers, machines, and spaces of Scotland's weaving tradition, while exploring the urgency of preserving a disappearing craft.