2014 Festival
Redipùglia WW1 Memorial. Presente: I am here
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” L P Hartley, The Go Between
The vast shifting mass of the past is subject to an eternal edit: academic blacksmithing, critical competitiveness, forensic scrutiny, reappraisal, revision, speculation, opinion, assertion and denial. Much of it eludes consensus.
New evidence challenges received wisdom. Evolving attitudes colour our perception. Established facts are photo-shopped to illustrate or justify preferred narratives. We see it through the distorting lens of the present as its long wake recedes behind us.
Only the future is constant. The past changes all the time.
Roddy Murray: Head of Visual Arts & Literature
Faclan 2014 was about how we view, relate to and engage with the past and how it affects us.
AUTHOR EVENTS
- A Book of Death and Fish: Ian Stephen (Debut Book Launch hosted by Robert Macfarlane)
- An Island Girl’s Journey: Dolina Maclennan
- 1913: The World Before the Great War: Charles Emmerson
- The Flowers of the Forest: Trevor Royle
- Seo Mi: Here I am – Sandra Murray
- The Old Ways: Robert Macfarlane (hosted by close friend and mentor, Finlay Macleod. In the audience Steve Dilworth and Anne Campbell also profiled in The Old Ways.)
- Reading the Highland Landscape: John Murray a revelation for non-Gaelic speakers, where much of the history and meaning of the landscape is locked behind a language barrier.
- The Great Arc & Colonel Colin Mackenzie: John Keay One of the most renowned commentators and historians on India, referencing arguably Stornoway’s most famous son, Colonel Colin Mackenzie, the first Surveyor General of India.
- Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape – Jay Griffiths
- Rock Stars Stole My Life: Mark Ellen
- Iain Morrison, splicing his new album Ceol Beag with B.L.O.T (Basic Love of Things) from Delhi who are video-jockeys and electronica club-night specialists. A unique mash-up between east and west, sound and image, the musical past and the future.
FILMS
- The Passion of Joan of Arc a newly commissioned piano accompaniment by Peter Urpeth
- Battleship Potemkin,
- All Quiet on the Western Front
- Drifters.