Bothy Life in the Evening Times

Cat McGoldrick:

'Great outdoors saved my life'

THE simple mountain bothy might provide shelter to hillwalkers in remote corners of the country. Cat McGoldrick could never have imagined the transformative effect the refuge would have on her life.

Visiting a remote lodge in Glen Etive with Venture Scotland took the 27-year-old out of Glasgow and into an environment so different from her life in the East End of Glasgow, she vowed to change.

Struggling with alcoholism from her mid teens, for years her life for a string of drinking binges followed by blackouts. In and out of hospital to be treated for pancreatitis and liver problems, Cat has lost her older brother and a number of friends to addiction.

In trouble with the police and eventually on a home curfew, the future couldn’t have looked any bleaker. That’s when Cat says she hit rock bottom and knew she had to do something about it.

In BBC Scotland’s Bothy Life, she talks about how a basic cabin in the Highlands gave her time to take stock and build the confidence to tackle her demons.

Read the full article here

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/14126179.Cat_McGoldrick___Great_outdoors_saved_my_life_/

Accidental Anarchist and a new democracy - New York Times

Last month Hopscotch Films, with the support of Creative Scotland and the Sundance Documentary Institute, sent Carne Ross, former diplomat and author of the Leaderless Revolution to Syria.

Carne travelled to the defacto autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava where a new form of democracy is blossoming. Read about what Carne found in his New York Times op ed published today.

Click image to continue reading. 

Accidental Anarchist continues filming and is due out in 2016.

Atomic Review - Showing Not Telling

With a critical response size probably disproportionate to its viewing figures, Mark Cousin’s cine-docu-essay-poem Atomic, Living in Dread and Promise aired on Saturday as part of the BBC’s coverage remembering the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings 70 years ago. The manner in which the film was constructed, while typical of Cousin’s singular style, stands out for the most part as unique in field of documentary films, and it could hopefully signal a very promising change for TV documentaries.

Read full review below

http://www.impactnottingham.com/2015/08/showing-not-telling-atomic-living-in-dread-and-promise-and-tv-documentaries/

 

Atomic (trailer)

70 years ago this month the bombing of Hiroshima showed the appalling destructive power of the atomic bomb.  Mark Cousins’ bold new documentary looks at death in the atomic age, but life too.  Using only archive film and a new musical score by the band Mogwai,  Atomic shows us an impressionistic kaleidoscope of our nuclear times: protest marches, Cold War sabre rattling, Chernobyl and Fukishima, but also the sublime beauty of the atomic world, and how X Rays and MRI scans have improved human lives.  The nuclear age has been a nightmare, but dreamlike too.

Watch the film: BBC2 Scotland 8th August 21:10 and BBC4 Storyville 9th August 21:00

 

 

Variety: review I Am Belfast

A brilliantly perceptive review of Mark Cousin's work on I Am Belfast in Variety. 

“If “The Story of Film” taught us anything, it’s that Cousins doesn’t see movies — or the world, for that matter — the same as other people. So why should he make movies the way they do? Though “I Am Belfast” never reveals his actual methods, Cousins assembled the film in an organic and wildly unconventional way: Like a gleaner, picking up scraps life has left behind, he would observe as a painter does, looking for specific colors, and listen like a jazz musician, blending found sounds with recovered echoes from composer David Holmes’ archives to trance-encouraging effect.”

For the full article by Peter Debruge click here.