This year’s Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) presents the world premieres of a couple of films showcasing minority languages in the U.K., namely Welsh and Scottish Gaelic.
“I’m really pleased [with] this mini-strand that has naturally sprung up in GFF’s programming this year, focusing on minority U.K. languages,” Glasgow head of program Paul Gallagher tells THR. “I think there is a keen audience interest in unique stories from specific communities, and film is such a perfect way to explore lives and experiences different from our own.”
Sailm nan Daoine (Psalms of the People) is one of 13 Scottish films in this year’s GFF lineup. The Gaelic- and English-language documentary from director Jack Archer (Bill Douglas: My Best Friend) follows Scottish Gaelic psalm precentor Rob MacNeacail on a musical journey from his singing group in Carlops across Scotland and Ireland as he celebrates the cultural heritage of psalm singing.
“While traditional Gaelic psalm singing is a bit of a niche interest, Psalms of the People captures both its importance as part of Scottish culture and heritage, and its unique power as a community activity,” Gallagher says. “The film feels like a genuine, authentic record of a part of Scotland’s culture that is familiar to anyone north of Glasgow, but perhaps rather un-sung – pun intended.”
Archer tells THR that Psalms goes deep on a local level to really anchor it in the culture it explores. “I wanted the film to be universal, and the best way to be universal is to be specific,” he says. “If you’re specific about someone’s own situation and their own story, then people can relate to it because they can relate to that. So, the intention was to tell a universal story about a very specific set of circumstances.”
The director also sees a real opportunity for Gaelic-language content to connect in the age of globalization and streaming. “Audiences are so used to reading subtitles as they’re watching, younger audiences in particular,” he highlights. “So, making a film in a minority language isn’t the barrier that it maybe once used to be.”
Scottish Gaelic-language TV channel BBC Alba, launched in 2008 by the BBC and MG Alba, helped fund the project as a feature film with an eye not simply on the core audience of Gaelic speakers, but “a wider audience through cinema,” Archer recalls.
The use of subtitles was key for that. After all, audiences may be captivated by the psalm singing itself, but then can also find more things that capture their imagination in the observational doc. “It’s not just the nice sound and the nice thing that these words are thousands of years old,” Archer notes. “The words also really connect to our story and Rob’s story.”
By weaving together songs, sounds, words, and visuals, Psalms gives audiences a real feel for the broader culture. “One thing about Gaelic culture that lends itself to cinema, in particular, is the musicality of it,” offers Archer. “There’s music in so many different aspects of life, not just the religious setting.”
That is likely also why Archer and MacNeacail have already had “loose discussions” about other possible joint projects. “We’re sharing a common interest in culture and the environment, language and music, and where that all meets and comes together. And there’s a lot to explore within the Gaelic culture, historically,” says the director.
The two creatives actually worked together on Archer’s previous film, with MacNeacail handling the sound design, before embarking on the journey that became Psalms. “We had lots of interesting conversations,” the director recalls. “And two years ago, he sent me this email and said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve not gotten back to you for a while because I’ve been organizing a memorial for my dad, who passed away. And we sang the psalms at his memorial.’ He attached to the email an audio recording of it. And for me, everything that we’d been talking about, all the different things that were perhaps ideas and abstract things, suddenly became something tangible.”
He realized that MacNeacail suddenly had noone at home to speak or sing with in Gaelic. “What he went on to do with his singing group was to really try keeping the language going for him,” Archer shares. “He has given people an opportunity to come and try out words and talk, without being judged, in a safe place. So, it became clear to me that it was about this wider thing and goal for Rob.”
Archer says that he tried to make Psalms a movie that would appeal to him as a viewer. “I spend a lot of time reading the news and getting depressed,” he shares. “So I quite like watching a film that takes me [away from that, just like Psalms]. And the film [shows examples of the idea] that if you’re secure with your own culture, you don’t need to be insecure about other people’s cultures.”
‘Psalms of the People’
Courtesy of Glasgow Film Festival
How does Archer feel about world premiering Sailm nan Daoine (Psalms of the People) at the Glasgow festival? “It’s just ideal,” he tells THR. “In terms of the core Gaelic audience for the film, so many people who speak Gaelic live in Glasgow. But it’s also just such a great festival in terms of the range of films. I’ve got tickets for Marc Evans’ [Welsh-language] film, because I’m really curious to see that.”
Archer is talking about Effi o Blaenau, a Welsh-language feature, starring Leisa Gwenllian as the hard-partying young woman Effi in rural Wales whose life largely revolves around drinking vodka with her friends and eating instant noodles to cure her subsequent hangovers – until her life suddenly changes dramatically. Directed by Marc Evans (Mr Burton, Steeltown Murders), the movie also stars Tom Rhys Harries, Owen Alun, and Nel Rhys Lewis.
“An incredible starmaking turn by debuting lead actress Leisa Gwenllian makes Effi o Blaenau an absolute must-see,” says Glasgow festival programmer Gallagher. “Marc Evans’ film immediately grabs you with the contrast of Effi’s abrasive, hard-partying attitude and Blaenau’s sleepy rural Welsh setting, then tells a story that goes to unexpectedly deep and dramatic places.”
Evans tells THR that what he may have in common with some Scottish filmmakers is looking for and finding a way to make movies using “these small languages that can reach the people who speak that language, but also make films that hopefully will travel and bring that language to the world. That’s how I discover other people’s cultures, and I hope it’s a way that people might discover ours.”
The director feels that Effi fits into his overall work quite naturally. “I have always been really interested in where the Welsh language lives and how it can live in different places,” he says. “The very first film I made was a bilingual film in Welsh and English, without subtitles, so that when you watched the film, you took a position on the languages. That was influenced by a film that I’d seen when I was young, [Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s] Padre Padrone. It is set in Sardinia and deals with the tension between Italian and Sardo. Obviously, if you speak a minority language as a first language, you gravitate towards other countries that understand the nuances and challenges of having a small language. So I’ve always been interested in that.”
Evans previously even made a film in Welsh and Spanish called Patagonia, about Welsh people in Argentina. “Again, I was trying to find a film that is a little capsule of our world that can travel and let other people enter our world,” the director tells THR. “The story, I think, is universal, but the language is very niche.”
Effi is based on Gary Owen’s monodrama Iphigenia in Splott, which he wrote based on the Greek myth of Iphigenia during the COVID pandemic. “Our film was a journey from a classical idea to an English-language monologue set in working-class Cardiff to a film set in working-class north Wales, for reasons of geography and culture, to transpose the play to a Welsh-language drama,” says Evans.
The creative team shot the film in Blaenau Ffestiniog, which the director calls one of only a couple of towns in Wales where Welsh is spoken all the time. “It is an old slate town, an amazing place, and the working-class kids just speak Welsh,” he tells THR.
Having to cast a Welsh-speaking lead “simplifies things, because you have to have somebody who speaks the language, so you just look for all the Welsh actors out there who are coming through,” Evans explains. He felt really lucky when he found Gwenllian. “As soon as I met her, I knew she was right. She’s done a bit of work, she went to drama college, so she’s trained,” he says. “And she just seemed to me to have the spirit and the technique to carry a film.”
Evans highlights that the young star’s connection with cinematographer Eira Wyn Jones was key to the production. “I was very aware that I was a man telling a woman’s story,” he tells THR. “So I was very keen to feminize the shoot and work with a lot of women. So I wanted a female DOP, and I found Eira, who lives in Paris and is Welsh-speaking. This was one of the things I wanted to get right because there are some quite intimate scenes, and I wanted the person behind the lens to be female. It’s Leisa’s first film, and it’s Eira’s first film as a DOP. That connection was core to the success of the film.”
The filmmaker loves that he can debut Effi o Blaenau at Glasgow. “It’s just great and interesting to go to smaller, vibrant festivals and have that experience,” Evans says. “And the connection between Scottish culture and Welsh culture makes that particularly meaningful.”
GFF opened on Feb. 15 and runs through March 8.