Protest Poem: a screening and conversation with artist and filmmaker Andrew Black

Andrew Black is an artist and filmmaker based in Scotland. Often working closely with rural communities, his work shows ways that we can imagine and create alternative ways of living in the landscape.

Fresh from his nomination for the Jarman Award (the UK’s most prestigious moving image prize), Andrew joins us for a screening of his film Dàn Fianais (Protest Poem) followed by an informal conversation about his filmmaking practice. Dàn Fianais is a film-portrait of Skye and Lochalsh and some of its inhabitants, recorded in 2020-21. Some of the contributors are young activists demanding an equitable solution to the rapid gentrification of their villages and townships; others are crofters, storytellers, archivists, musicians and academics. Collaged with vernacular music and song, the conversations within the film invite imaginative contemplation of possible futures for Skye and Lochalsh – moving away from leisure-industry narratives of unpeopled scenery, and paying particular attention to ways of being that have endured through generations, in intimate entanglement with the land and its ecological systems.

After the screening, we’ll have the opportunity to chat with Andrew and contemplate the future of our own rural environment here in Cumbria.

Andrew Black has been nominated for the Jarman Award and was the 2021 recipient of the Margaret Tait Award. His commissioned film On Clogger Lane premiered at Glasgow Film Theatre in February 2023, was exhibited at The Tetley, Leeds, and will show at LUX, London in 2024. His work has shown at CCA Glasgow, Dundee Contemporary Arts and Centre Clark, Montreal.