For a small country lacking a true film production industry, Scotland has contributed a surprising amount to the world of cinema. Individual achievement by Scots has undoubtedly helped shape the history of film. Scotland’s greatest contribution to cinema is simply Scots themselves.
Scotland has a distinct identity - colourful, romantic, eccentric, with a wealth of great scenery, with a history and myths interpreted by writers of the quality of Scott and Stevenson. The very stuff from which good films can be made.

From McNab’s Visit to London (Alpha Trading Co, 1905 - "golf-club-wielding Scotsman terrifies maid by emerging minus kilt from fireplace") to the awfulness of Brigadoon (MGM, 1954) and the enjoyable nonsense of Braveheart (Twentieth Century Fox, 1995), Scots culture has fed the appetites of Hollywood, Bollywood, and everyone else. The celluloid Scotland that emerges through the mists rarely looks like the one Scots live in, but that’s another matter.

There are other contributions that, in the last analysis, are more important than the outrages visited upon us in the name of cinema. In fact there have been many outstanding Scots in all the disciplines of the medium - actors, writers, producers, directors, cinematographers, editors, distributors, exhibitors and technical innovators. They all deserve to be recognised.

Sunk At The Beginning

It is true that Scotland’s relationship with cinema has tended to be one-sided. As consumers Scots are second to none. It is no accident that in the Edinburgh International Film Festival, founded in 1947, Scotland has the longest-running event of its kind in the world and one of the most influential. On the other hand, as producers Scots compare unfavourably with the majority of small countries, or did so until relatively recently. Film making was traditionally something that happened elsewhere, it was something done to Scotland rather than by Scots for themselves, and it was not until Bill Forsyth’s no-budget That Sinking Feeling (1979) that Scots saw it was possible that fiction films could be made entirely indigenously.

There was, however, a Scotsman in at the very birth of the movies. William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (1860 - 1935) did not come from Scotland, nor did he live or die in Scotland, but he was very proud of his Scottish parentage nonetheless, so we Scotland can will claim him as her own.

Kinetoscope Pioneer

Kennedy emigrated from France to the United States in 1879 and in 1883 joined Thomas Edison. In just two years he had contributed crucial work towards the development of moving pictures. In particular, he designed the "Kinetoscope" (patented by Edison) which not only proved successful as a peepshow but, with its 35mm gauge and double row of sprocket holes, was the basis for cinema film of the future. In 1897 he moved to British Biograph and became the first film cameraman to cover a war - The Boer War.

A more legitimate claim to Scottish priority can be made for the experimental work of Dr John McIntyre who in March 1896, a month before any public film screening in Scotland, made moving X-ray footage of human and animal subjects.

This use of the medium for practical purposes pre-echoes the area of cinema in which thirty years later Scotland would exhibit a special strength and make a contribution that was genuinely far-reaching in world terms - John Grierson’s documentary movement. Before that, however, there were plenty of Scots doing their best to make an impact in film.

Showmen Grow Big

The showmen who became the exhibitors, distributors and producers had many Scots in their ranks. John Maxwell (1877-1940) was a Glasgow solicitor who handled the legal affairs of a number of small cinemas and, seeing the commercial possibilities, acquired a stake in them. By 1922 his "Scottish Cinema and Variety Theatres" had 20 cinemas and he had moved into production with Waverley Films. Expanding south, he created British International Pictures which made young Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), the first British talking picture.

In 1928 Maxwell had set up Associated British Cinemas and in 1937 Associated British Picture Corporation. Invariably described as "canny", by the time of his death in 1940 he had become one of the most powerful figures in the film industry and was credited with having made the cinema financially respectable to the point that the City could regard it as a legitimate area of investment.

The showmen may have been essentially home-based but the actors knew no geographical boundaries. Scots, particularly those with theatrical experience, were discovering that the new medium could provide a living, nowhere more so than among the many emigrants who found their way to America. The "Hollywood Scots" were a multifarious collection who impacted early and in all the various disciplines that the business could offer. Most of them are now virtually forgotten: William Shea (1862-1918) from Dumfries who was Vitagraph’s first comedian; the Torrence brothers; Mary Garden (better known as an opera singer); Lorna Moon (1886-1930) from Strichen who wrote for Garbo; Lon Chaney, and for the Oscar-winner Marie Dressler, and gave birth to a son by William de Mille (adopted secretly by Cecil B).

Hollywood Scots

Of the more famous Scots in Hollywood, there have been plenty to celebrate. Eric Campbell (1878-1917) from Dunoon was Chaplin’s giant foil. His death in a car accident robbed the screen of one of the great presences. Frank Lloyd (1889-1960) began as an actor but went on to direct more than a hundred films and three Oscar winners including Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). His first Oscar was in 1929, only the second year of the awards. There were seven Best Director nominations and he had three of them. He won with The Divine Lady, a Nelson-Lady Hamilton epic.

Donald Crisp (1880-1974) and David Niven (1909-83) both claimed Scots birth, though Niven was born in England of Scots parents, but the very English Deborah Kerr (born 1921) was born in Glasgow and lived briefly in Helensburgh, from where Jack Buchanan (1891-1957) and Andy Clyde (1892-1967) also came. Mary Gordon (1882-1963), too, was the genuine Scottish article, and there were many others.

Nationalist Icon

Sir Sean Connery, Ewan McGregor, Craig Ferguson, Brian Cox, Alan Cummings, Robert Carlyle, Robbie Coltrane and the like can therefore be seen to be following in something of a tradition, but it would be hard to argue against Connery, "the most famous living Scot", being placed in a category of his own. His contribution to the film industry is clearly a very special one which needs no elaboration. Quite apart from playing the iconic James Bond, his capacity to breathe life into some very ordinary roles and to take others to levels they hardly deserve remains a remarkable achievement. Given a really good part as in, for example, the Sidney Lumet films, The Hill (1965), The Anderson Tapes (1972), and The Offence (1973), he simply excels.

However, no Scot had more impact on the way films were actually made than John Grierson (1898-1972). He was styled "the Father of the Documentary" and it is no exaggeration to say that he determined the course of factual film-making internationally from the moment he arrived on the scene in 1929 with his account of the lives of North Sea fishermen in Drifters .

Founder Documentarian

He coined the term "documentary" as a means of describing the earlier work of Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Moana, 1922) but his intention was not to promote a particular genre of film-making. Rather it was to use film as a means to social ends. His concern was with mass communication and the cinema was his medium. Documentary was not about retelling facts; it was about "the creative treatment of actuality". Thus it was perfectly proper in Night Mail (1936) that the post office train interiors were shot in a studio and the "postmen" were actors. What counted was the message.

He had transformed the film unit of the Empire Marketing Board, later the GPO Film Unit, by bringing to it formidable creative and political skills and building an outstanding team including the great names of documentary: Edgar Anstey, Basil Wright, Paul Rotha, Harry Watt, Stuart Legg, Humphrey Jennings, Arthur Elton, John Taylor, Alberto Cavalcanti, and his own sisters, Marion and Ruby. Moreover, it was he who had the foresight and nerve to commission W H Auden and Benjamin Britten to provide verse and music for Night Mail.

In 1937 he created a new kind of film agency, Film Centre. In 1939 he set up one of the world’s great film organisations, the National film Board of Canada, and later he was director of mass communications at UNESCO, Controller of Film for the Central Office of Information and, ironically for a documentarian, director of Group Three, a body designed to promote British fiction films. It was also entirely typical of his appetite to communicate and influence that for eight years he presented Scottish Television’s This Wonderful World.

Pixillator

Another outstanding Scottish contributor to the progress of one particular kind of film was spotted by Grierson at an amateur film festival in Glasgow. Norman McLaren (1914-87) would go with him to the National Film Board in Canada and create a new language of film animation. His innovative techniques of drawing straight on to celluloid, or of pixilating live action, and cutting to music in new and dynamic ways in films such as Fiddle-de-Dee, Stars and Stripes, Les de Deux and the Oscar winning Neighbours (1952) placed him at the head of his profession. If the international influence of Grierson and McLaren in their fields is obvious, the Scottish contribution to mainstream fiction filmmaking is less so. But Alexander Mackendrick (1912-93) - like McLaren, a product of Glasgow School of Art - is among the most important directors of his generation. Whisky Galore, The Ladykillers, The Man in the White Suit, Sammy Going South and High Wind in Jamaica are among his triumphs, but a collaboration with James Kennaway on a proposed Mary, Queen of Scots did not happen. Uncomfortable with the Hollywood machine, Mackendrick was nonetheless highly influential in America, not as a director but as an outstanding film teacher.

International Scottish impact from the 1980s has of course been largely through Bill Forsyth, with his very individual style of film-making. Often misunderstood, his work is patently influential, as evidenced by the number of films made in imitation, particularly of Gregory’s Girl (1981), which spawned a genre of gentle humorous movies dealing with adolescent and domestic themes. Like Mackendrick, whose Hebridean movies presaged Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983), Forsyth is not a Hollywood man, which may be just as well, but the fact that his name is often cited in relation to other people’s films is proof of a special contribution to cinema.

Dynamic Period

By the 1990s the Scottish filmmaking scene had become much more dynamic (partly due to Channel Four and Lottery funding) and at last there were native (or at least semi-native) productions that reached out. Rob Roy (United Artists, 1995) was the brain-child of Glasgow producer Peter Broughan, but the outstanding Scottish film of the period was Trainspotting (Figment Films, 1996) - a film with true international impact.

As to the potential for future Scottish contributions to cinema, much depends on how Scotland’s domestic film scene develops and those accidents of birth that throw up special talents. Certainly there are now more Scottish filmmakers than there have ever been, many of them very successful. For example, directors Gillies Mackinnon, Michael Caton-Jones, Peter Mullan, Lynne Ramsay and Bill Forsyth all have international clout. So too do producers Andrew Macdonald and Iain Smith, composers Craig Armstrong and Patrick Doyle, and cinematographer Michael Coulter - and there are others.

Pity there is so little opportunity for them to pursue their vocations in Scotland. Arguably, this is why there is not a more coherent Scottish contribution to world cinema, but rather a series of individual impacts, important as they sometimes are in themselves.

But there is hope: in producing the all-digital One Life Stand, largely from her flat in Garnethill, May Miles Thomas has demonstrated what can be achieved with the new technologies without leaving home. Scottish movie talent and enterprise is still very much alive.

Documenters Of Scottish Life:

John Grierson: recognised as the founding father of the documentary. He coined the term, and made the first major British documentary, Drifters, in 1929, a silent film about the fishing industry.

From Stirlingshire, he was an idealistic man who saw the documentary as the way forward for instilling social cohesion in a society of cinema-goers. He went on to be involved in the making of over 300 films and the Edinburgh Film Festival was founded in 1947 to celebrate his achievement.

Jenny Gilbertson: encouraged by Grierson, she made The Rugged Island - A Shetland Lyric, in 1934. Based around the story of a young couple, it gave a vivid insight into the hardship of life on the islands.

Under the auspices of two Films of Scotland committees, documentary making in Scotland enjoyed lengthy periods of public funding between the 1930s and the 1960s. The films produced varied in quality. Many were travelogues which, with images of coastlines and scenic glens, did much to aid the tourism industry.

The greatest value of this period was not in the material it produced but in the talent it nurtured. Young filmmakers had the opportunity to practise their skills, which laid an important foundation for film-making in Scotland. We have cause to be thankful for the emergence of the following:

Murray Grigor: a one-time editor at the BBC and director of the Edinburgh Film Festival, he began his filmmaking career with the highly acclaimed documentary McIntosh. He formed his own film production company, Viz, with his wife, Barbara, and specialised in making films about the arts and culture. He continues today: in 1999, his television documentary about Alexander "Greek" Thomson had a higher audience than ER.

Bill Douglas: made an influential trilogy of films in the 1970s, My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home, and cut his filmmaking teeth on documentaries. The black and white films, which are partly autobiographical, tell the story of a young lad growing up in a tough mining village. The trilogy has been declared one of Scotland’s greatest cinematic achievements.

Kevin Macdonald: documentary making in Scotland is no longer publicly funded, but that did not stop Macdonald picking up an Oscar for best documentary in 2000.

His film, One Day in September, about the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, stunned Hollywood by beating the hot tip, Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club.

Macdonald chose to use archive foot-age and interviews with survivors and family members, but blended them into a tight film that was more a thriller than a documentary.

It is important to remember that his award is part of a seven-decade tradition of Scots documentary making. Macdonald stands in the shoes of Grierson, who received an Oscar for documentaries 40 years before.

Scotland's Oscar Winners:

DEBORAH KERR

When Deborah Kerr was filming with Burt Lancaster in Hawaii for the iconic scene in From Here to Eternity, opposite, she was unlikely to have thought of her home town of Helensburgh. But, despite spending much of her life outside Scotland, she never forgot the town of her birth. A former stage actress who grew up in Bristol, she worked in London before being signed up by Hollywood. Despite stunning turns in films such as Black Narcissus and The King and I and six Oscar nominations, she won one only by default in 1996, when she was given an honorary Oscar.

KEVIN MACDONALD

The young Scot beat German director Wim Wenders to an Oscar for best documentary with One Day in September, his reconstruction of the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics. Macdonald wrote a critically acclaimed biography of his grandfather, the film director Emeric Pressburger, before directing a number of documentaries on film-makers such as Donald Cammell and Howard Hawks. He is the lesser-known brother of Andrew Macdonald, producer of films such as Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and The Beach.

JOHN GRIERSON

Born in 1898 in Deanston, Stirlingshire, Grierson was the senior producer behind Seawards the Great Ships, the Oscar-winning documentary that put Scotland on the map in 1961 - although the Oscar went to producer Bob Riddell-Black. Grierson had earlier moved to Canada, where he ran the National Film Board, and to New York, where he had his own production company. Asked if he was a communist, he refused to be pigeon-holed and, although later officially cleared, his visa was not renewed, hence his return home. He died in 1972.

SEAN CONNERY

Scotland’s only cinematic superstar, Connery is always worth watching. After four decades in films he finally won an Oscar for best supporting actor in The Untouchables. .

Born and raised in Edinburgh, Connery was a milkman, nude model for art students, and body builder before his move into acting. He made his name as James Bond, a role he last played in 1983 in Never Say Never Again.

PETER CAPALDI

Capaldi won a Best Short Film Oscar with Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, in which Richard E Grant as the Czech author tries to decide which creature Grego Samsa should turn into. His acting break came in Local Hero and he moved into movie scriptwriting with Soft Top, Hard Shoulder. He has now completed his first feature as director, the Glasgow-set Simply Sinatra.

MICHAEL RADFORD

In 1995 Michael Radford walked out of the wilderness to collect won the Oscar for best foreign film for Il Postino. Nine years before, the flop of his previous film White Mischief had driven him to take an extended period travelling round Europe directing TV commercials. It was while in Italy that he was persuaded by a dying actor, Massimo Troisi, who was posthumously Oscar-nominated, to direct him in the tale of a poor postman’s meeting with a great poet.

Radford spent most of his formative years in Cairnryan and made his first film with a camera he found in a drawer at Edinburgh’s Stevenson College, where he taught English.

FRANK LLOYD

Cambuslang-born Lloyd is arguably Scotland’s most successful film director. The recipient of three Oscars, one for producing Mutiny on the Bounty and two for best director, The Divine Lady, a silent film in 1929 and Cavalcade in 1933. Lloyd made a total of 157 films during a 45-year career and earned 14 Oscar nominations. Born in Scotland in 1886, Lloyd followed his parents onto the music hall stage when he was 15 and by 1913 he was employed as an extra in Los Angeles in the early days of cinema. Progressing from writer to director he was the James Cameron of his day as Cavalcade was the most expensive talkie ever made . He died in 1960 .

NORMAN MCLAREN

The philosophy of Norman McLaren was: "animation is not the art of drawings that move, but rather the art of movements that are drawn". A strong believer in simplicity and frugality, the Scottish-born McLaren eschewed special effects and big budgets for the fewest lines and smallest expense. Invited to found an animation unit for the National Film Board of Canada, he spent three years teaching art before focusing on his own art. McLaren collected an Oscar in 1952 for Neighbours in which two men come to blows over the possession of a daisy in their adjoining backyards. Released in the paranoid depths of the Cold War the short film was read as an eloquent plea for peace. He died in 1987.

The Top Twenty Scottish Films:


1. Braveheart (1995: Mel Gibson)

Scotland lent Hollywood its history and Hollywood gave it a "creation myth" in return. After visiting Scotland and seeing Wallace’s statue, US writer Randall Wallace decided Wallace might make a good subject for a film. So what if they tweaked the odd historical detail? They produced a rousing piece of entertainment, that compares favourably with the epics of Kirk Douglas and Charlton Heston.

2. Trainspotting (1996: Danny Boyle)

If Braveheart gave Scotland a belief in itself, Trainspotting made the country positively cool. The film-making troika of Boyle, Macdonald and Hodge turned to Irvine Welsh’s cult novel for their follow-up to Shallow Grave. Although it does not glamorise drugs (far from it), neither does it fob the audience off with platitudes.

3. Whisky Galore! (1949: Alexander Mackendrick)

"A happy people with few and simple pleasures," says the opening voice-over, as nine children appear, one after the other, through a crofthouse door. Commentators have dismissed Mackendrick’s comedy about the islanders as stereotypical, patronising and tame, but it is funny and highly subversive.

In attempting to salvage 50,000 cases of whisky from a grounded ship, a criminal Celtic brotherhood outwit the English Home Guard captain. Mackendrick, a Presbyterian with a strong work ethic, fell out with producer Monja Danischewsky over the latter’s romantic vision of a remote community fighting foreign interference, but Danischewsky finally got his way.

4. The 39 Steps (1935: Alfred Hitchcock)

Hitchcock’s Scotland, like that of Brigadoon, was a Scotland that existed largely in its creator’s imagination. Fugitive Robert Donat does make a daring escape on the Forth Bridge, but on the other side he finds himself in the middle of the Highlands, a suitably barren and sinister landscape. The scene in which a woman’s scream turns into the whistle of a train is a landmark of early sound cinema, while Hollywood has come up with few sexier moments than that in which Madeleine Carroll attempts to remove wet stockings while handcuffed to Donat.

5. Local Hero (1983: Bill Forsyth)

Bill Forsyth became a one-man Scottish film industry with That Sinking Feeling and Gregory’s Girl. For Local Hero, he recruited Hollywood star Burt Lancaster and retreated to the Highlands. The film attracted the same sort of criticism as Whisky Galore!, criticism which was equally misguided. Forsyth builds stereotypes only to undermine them - the Highland idyll shattered by a low-flying jet, and the remote village whose minister is black.

6. The Wicker Man (1974: Robin Hardy)

Yet another film that focuses on a remote Scottish community, though this is a true one-off, a unique blend of horror and musical that went on to become a cult classic. Edward Woodward flies to the island of Summerisle to investigate a child’s disappearance. The upright policeman is shocked to discover a people obsessed with sex, and suspects the missing girl has been the victim of human sacrifice.

7. Gregory’s Girl (1981: Bill Forsyth)

What Rebel Without a Cause was to disaffected LA youth in the 1950s, Gregory’s Girl was to pimply Scottish teenagers in the 1980s. John Gordon Sinclair is the hopeless goalie in a hopeless school team, Dee Hepburn is the girl who comes into the side and proves a star.

8. The Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-78)

Douglas’s autobiographical trilogy holds a unique place in Scottish cinema, the only indigenous work that compares with European arthouse classics. The first instalment, My Childhood, presents a sparse portrait of a boy, Jamie, living in poverty in a Scottish mining village in the 1940s.

9. Highlander (1986: Russell Mulcahy)

Reviled by critics, Highlander inspired a cult following, three sequels, plus live-action and animated TV series. Frenchman Christopher Lambert/Russell Nash plays Conner MacLeod, one of a race who are (virtually) immortal and must battle each other through the centuries for no other reason than "there can be only one". Sean Connery is his Egyptian-Spanish mentor. The action jumps between modern New York and 16th-century Scotland, an amalgam of swashbuckler and urban thriller, exploiting, for all it is worth, the Hollywood stereotype of the noble Highlander.

10. Brigadoon (1954: Vincente Minnelli)

New Yorker Gene Kelly gets lost in the Highlands, stumbles upon a village that appears only once every 100 years and falls for one of the villagers. Producer Arthur Freed shot his musical on an MGM soundstage in Hollywood after touring Scotland and failing to find any locations Scottish enough for his requirements. On the face of it this seems outrageous, but his failure to find Brigadoon in Scotland really is the whole point of the film - Brigadoon is Scotland the Fantasy and can exist only in the imagination and in Hollywood.

11. Shallow Grave (1994: Danny Boyle)

Three young professionals rent out their spare room to a new flatmate, who promptly dies, leaving a suitcase of money behind. The trio decide to keep it and dispose of the body, though they soon find themselves in violent conflict with the dead man’s associates and each other. A fast and assured thriller, Shallow Grave kick-started the Scottish film industry and turned producer Andrew Macdonald, writer John Hodge and director Danny Boyle into a major force. It also gave Ewan McGregor his first big break.

12. The Brothers (1947: David MacDonald)

A neglected minor masterpiece, The Brothers is a searing melodrama of good and evil, innocence and corruption, with a Scottish director and a largely Scottish cast. Patricia Roc plays an orphan from Glasgow who in 1900 becomes the servant of a Skye crofter (Finlay Currie) and his sons (Duncan Macrae and Maxwell Reed), in a community where transgressors are sent bobbing out into the ocean, tied up with floats and a fish on their head, which will attract seabirds to dive from a great height and pierce both fish and skull together. Shot in ghostly greys, The Brothers uses its backdrop of sea and mountains to telling effect, building to a powerful climax.

13. Tunes of Glory (1960: Ronald Neame)

Alec Guinness thought this compelling character drama was probably his best work. He was offered the role of the suave, Oxford-educated Colonel Barrow, but persuaded director Ronald Neame to let him play against type as Barrow’s nemesis, Colonel Sinclair. Guinness was almost certainly drawing on his stepfather, a Scottish officer who menaced him with a pistol and held him upside down from a bridge.

14. Rob Roy (1995: Michael Caton-Jones)

The famous outlaw had been the subject of several previous films, including Disney’s Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue, a title which made him sound one step removed from a naughty schoolboy. The 1995 film was conceived, produced, written and directed by Scots, though the money came from Hollywood and Liam Neeson. It has all the requisite action, is strong on characterisation too, and treats its subject with intelligence and respect. Caton-Jones makes guse of West Highland locations.

15. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969: Ronald Neame)

It is only right that this portrait of Edinburgh, in all its unashamed middle-class glory, should be included in any list of the best of Scottish film . Miss Brodie sees herself as a beacon of culture in the stuffy traditional school where she teaches, instilling in her girls an appreciation not just of Italian artists, but of Italian fascism. She is in her own way as narrow-minded and snobbish as anyone at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, and much more dangerous.

16. Breaking the Waves (1996: Lars von Trier)

The film that divided Scotland’s chattering classes five years ago, some calling it a classic and others walking out in disgust. Emily Watson plays a childlike young woman living in a remote village, who talks directly to God and marries a foreign oil worker. Paralysed in an accident, he asks her to have sex with strangers and describe the encounters. The film captures the oppressiveness of the Presbyterian community, though it was not originally set in Scotland.

17. Culloden (1964: Peter Watkins)

Made for television, but subsequently shown in cinemas, Watkins’s mock-documentary offers an antidote to the romanticised version of the Jacobite Rising. The device of having a modern TV crew in an 18th-century battle, complete with posh BBC interviewer, may appear Pythonesque, but Watkins is in deadly earnest, highlighting the confusion and misery of the soldiers and the cowardice of their leaders.

18. Small Faces (1995: Gillies MacKinnon)

Brothers Gillies and Billy MacKinnon drew on their own experiences for this story of three brothers growing up on the mean streets of Glasgow in the 1960s. Kevin McKidd was hired for Trainspotting after Danny Boyle saw the rushes for Small Faces and Laura Fraser quit drama school to pursue her career in films.

19. Mrs Brown (1997: John Madden)

Billy Connolly was John Brown, Queen Victoria’s bit of Scottish rough, in this film that started life as a BBC Scotland TV drama. Then Miramax came on board and turned it into an Oscar contender. Victoria (Judi Dench) sank into deep depression after the death of her husband, Albert, before finding solace with Brown. Their apparently chaste, "odd couple" relationship is strangely poignant.

20. Orphans (1997: Peter Mullan)

It is one of the great moments of Scottish cinema - Gary Lewis staggering through a cemetery with a coffin on his back, refusing offers of help, with the line "She ain’t heavy, she’s my mother". This is a bitter-sweet mix of tragedy and the darkest comedy, as four grown-up children try to come to terms with their loss. Peter Mullan won the Cannes best actor award for it.