Meeting the Minister

Maureen Watt MSP Minister for Mental Health meeting the chair of the Scottish Dementia Working Group, Archie Noone. Archie himself has vascular dementia. Taken at a photocall linked to the launch of the Scottish Government's dementia care strategy. This was an opportunity for the minister to meet campaigners at a local GP's surgery and discuss some of the issues directly. Whatever your politics it seemed a good example of the work of politicians - listening more than talking and hearing directly from people affected. Although I dutifully sent the images out to the press, no one used any of them. The National did at least run an article on the meeting but I think they went with a snap from their reporter rather than use, and pay, for a better picture.
In the evening L ad I went to two more films in the Film Festival. The first was London Symphony. The director said it was harking back to similar films from the 1920s, hence the aspect ratio and the black and white images, but it seemed a case when style compromised content. And it was interesting to learn it had expanded from a short. It seemed it was simply much more of the same than trying to use the bigger canvas of a feature-length film to do something a bit different. I spent a lot of the film wondering how might I make an Edinburgh version, or a Portobello one. There seemed a lack of narrative running through it all, and yet, if it was a 'personal view' as the director acknowledged, it didn't feel personal enough either. A little disappointing, and it all felt smugly metropolitan. Other cities have urban foxes.
And the second film was also a little disappointing. I wanted to like it. Edie features a great acting performance from Sheila Hancock, as the old woman who decides she wants to climb Suilven. But the screenplay seemed clumsy, the storyline at times contrived and over-complicated and the characterisation was all over the place, if it bothered with characters at all. Like they wanted to avoid a 'chocolate box' depiction of the area by adding some gritty realism but only served to detract from what could have been a much tighter story arc. And too often the film seemed more like an advert for RBS, all drone footage of mountain tops, when surely more close-ups of Sheila Hancock's face would have been more interesting. Coming out it felt so much like a project I would love to do differently. Maybe in an alternative universe there is a version of me who has that opportunity - sadly it's not going to happen in this one.