THE chairman of the Scottish Arts Council, Magnus Linklater, yesterday hit back at claims that Scotland has made a glut of low-quality movie failures.
On the contrary, he said, Lottery-funded films were gaining distribution and theatrical release - and winning prizes. ''It is a pity that, when we have a real success story to tell, most of the comment about Scottish film seems to be negative,'' he said.
Mr Linklater was commenting about last night's BBC Scotland Frontline programme, in which James Wilson, a former production executive with Fox Searchlight, warned that moves to expand the Scottish film industry with more Lottery funding could end in disaster.
Mr Linklater pointed out that, of the 11 feature films funded under the SAC Lottery programme since 1995, only two had yet to find a distributor. This was well above the UK average.
This month Cannes had brought further success with Peter Mullan winning best actor in Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe, a Lottery-funded film, and a second prize for the Tartan Short film Gasman.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article