This weekend, Stirling’s Macrobert Arts Centre is taken over by the 2024 Central Scotland Documentary Festival. It’s a fitting location given that John Grierson, father of the British documentary movement, was raised in Stirling.
On Friday night the festival honours him with a screening of Hitchcock on Grierson, a 1965 TV documentary on the filmmaker narrated by the Master of Suspense. Elsewhere, the festival offers deep dives into police brutality in France, the extremes of Japanese reality TV, and the threats posed to Mexican land activists by the cartels, the government, and big business.
Need some help deciding what to see? We’ve rounded up some of the screenings we’re looking forward to taking in this weekend.


Meet the Buchanans
The festival opens with the European premiere of Meet the Buchanans. Meet the Buchanans focuses on the modern-day descendants of the Buchanan clan, who travel to Perthshire from all around the globe for the inauguration of their newest Highland Chief – millionaire landowner Mike Buchanan. By delving into the pageantry and ceremony that goes into Mike’s inauguration, Meet the Buchanans probes vital questions around Scottish identity, history, and heritage – on what basis are they constructed, and who feels entitled to claim theirs? Co-director Barbara Orton, who we interviewed last year, will be taking part in a Q&A after the film.
Thursday 31st October, 7.30pm


A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things
An exploration of the work of Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Mark Cousins narrates his latest documentary in his typically beguiling way (‘What do we see?’) and Tilda Swinton stands in for the voice of Barns-Graham. Cousins hones in on a moment that became pivotal in the development and refinement of Barns-Graham’s mathematical visual language – a trip up the Swiss Grindelwald glaciers in the 40s. A loving tribute from one of art’s most effusive champions, Cousins will be taking part in a Q&A after the screening.
Friday 1st October, 5.15pm


Striking with Pride
The Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign in the 80s created bonds of solidarity and mutual aid between a striking Welsh mining community and the London-based queer community that supported them. Ten years on from the campaign’s portrayal in beloved modern classic Pride, Ashley Francis-Roy’s Striking with Pride seeks out the real people that were involved. The history of the campaign is narrated in a drag queen storytime session by Drag Race UK contestant Tayce. Given that drag queens have found themselves at the centre of the UK’s current transphobic moral panic, it’s a salient reminder that the stigma LGBT+ people endured in LGSM’s heyday persists in new forms and is still capable of driving wedges between communities that need each other.
Saturday 2nd November, 3.45pm


Stop Making Sense
Screenings of Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense tend to end up with people dancing in the aisles anyway, so CSDF have cut out the middleman and organised an immersive standing-room-only ‘gig’ screening, complete with light show! Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense may just be the best concert film of all time – a marvel of choreography, costuming, lighting, staging, and the gangly charisma of Dumbarton’s very own David Byrne. You’ll never look at a standing lamp the same way again.
Saturday 2nd November, 8pm


Celluloid Underground
Ehsan Khoshbakht is a film critic and curator who currently serves as co-director of Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival. His latest documentary Celluloid Underground invokes the political culture and people that shaped his formative experiences of cinema – people like Ahmad Jorghanian, a man whose vast collection of 35mm film saw him arrested and tortured in post-revolutionary Iran. Jorghanian lent Khoshbakht copies of films to screen at guerilla film clubs that he ran, an act of cultural subversion that sowed the seeds for Khoshbakht’s future programming career. Much like Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts, Celluloid Underground is an intensely personal meditation on how cinephilia takes root, and a token of appreciation towards the people and places that nurture it.
Sunday 3rd November, 6.30pm


Silent Men
Duncan Cowles’ most recent short film, Outlets, was a highlight of 2023’s Glasgow Short Film Festival – a humorous and moving look at his creative process and how grief over his granny’s death kept interfering with it. This year he returns to screens with his debut feature Silent Men, with Cowles hitting the road to speak to men about how they express their emotions. Although it’s interested in wider trends around masculinity, mental health, and emotional intimacy, Cowles anchors his film with a personal touch by interrogating his own difficulties in opening up to loved ones. Outlets showed Cowles’ knack for balancing his deadpan sense of humour with poignant insights into the human condition, so we anticipate laughing and crying our way through his latest.
Sunday 3rd November, 8pm
The 2024 Central Scotland Documentary Festival takes place from 31st October to 4th November.
Image Credits to the Macrobert’s 2024 Central Scotland Documentary Festival