Output details
36 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
Edinburgh Napier University
A Boat Retold - Documentary Film
On the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, artist and poet Ian Stephen, writer Robert Macfarlane and others tell stories in and around the wooden fishing boat, Broad Bay, restored and rigged as a traditional sgoth Niseach, as it sets sail for the remote Shiants archipelago. Following the boat on its eleven-hour voyage, we come to see it as a living story in itself – about island boats and boat builders, memories, legends and sea-roads – through interviews, storytelling and music.
The film deals with the renovation of a small Lewis fishing boat, Broad Bay, and its voyage to the Shiants in the summer of 2010. Digital HD footage of this voyage is cut together with interviews about memories and practices of traditional ship building on the Isle of Lewis, and with sections in Super 8 to convey a sense of time depth. Shot in super8 and digital HD with original music by Stornoway resident Peter Urpeth and by the famous Gaelic singer Ishbel McAskill.
This documentary was commissioned & shown at the Stornoway Art Centre, An Lantair, as part of the Creative Scotland funded exhibition Losses Three, curated by Ian Stephen. Its British premiere was at the 13th Royal Anthropological International Festival of Ethnographic Film, 13-16 June 2013, Edinburgh, where it was shortlisted for the Material Culture & Archaeology Prize.
