Film Review: We Are Northern Lights (12A) (U.K. 2013) (Director: Nick Higgins) Wednesday 06.03.2013 20:20 The Filmhouse Cinema, Screen Three, Edinburgh 

This is the culmination of a project to capture the 'essence of Scotland' on 'film'. Members of the public were invited to submit their unique visions of what they saw as the essence of Scotland. This is essentially an edited down imagining culled from the 1,500 submissions that were received. There were clips that did appear to have very little to do with any sense of, or relation to Scotland or Scottishness.

There appears limited order to what is presented, and from the footage presented I thought this could have been achieved to a greater degree just from what the film contained. The film did appear to come to several natural endings and then would just carry on. This gave a sense of dragging on just due to the poor editing/ordering of the footage. The film landed up feeling significantly longer than it was. I don't think I could have held concentration if I was trying to watch this on T.V., which I feel is it's more natural home (or as an industry tourist video to show to foreign markets). - Something of this nature I would reckon to have very limited commercial appeal, and could only come about as a result of government funding, and therefore it is almost impossible for it to remain neutral, and sadly is almost artistically worthless, except in terms of historical propaganda interest in years to come.   

There were a couple of pro Scottish independence statements which I did not approve of as this was not balanced with anti statements. Though then I realised that this was funded by Creative Scotland, who ultimately answer to the Scottish government i.e. the (in my view dreaded and racist) S.N.P.. So it is easy to understand why there was a clear and ugly bias. There were also several scenes of either peoples joy at returning to Scotland from England or trepidation at the prospect of entering England, which just struck me as petty and shortsighted.

Now that the criticisms are out of the way...there are quite a few very funny passages in the film, and the footage of the Scottish countryside, particularly the highlands, which I found quite beautiful and reminded me of the beauty of where I come from (without showing you the narrowminded attitudes of many of those who live in these remote and beautiful places...don't want to put of those tourists now).

Rating:
(5/10 in terms of the enjoyment of some of the footage)
2/10 as a result of the politically unsubtle overtone.