CinemARC: The Rugged Island
Presented in partnership with HippFest, join us for this silent film screening with new live score by Inge Thomson and Catriona Macdonald.
ARC Public
Date: Friday 26 September 2025
Time: 18:15 - 20:30
Venue: University of Glasgow, Advanced Research Centre, 11 Chapel Lane
Category: Films and theatre
Hosted at the ARC in collaboration with HippFest, Scotland’s silent film festival, join us for this special presentation of Jenny Gilbertson’s The Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric from 1933.
Come along to this silent film screening with new live score by Inge Thomson and Catriona Macdonald. The Rugged Island is an extraordinary film directed by Jenny Gilbertson and loaned by the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive.
Afterwards, join us for a panel discussion with performers Inge Thomson and Catriona MacDonald, alongside Dr Shona Main and Professor Sarah Neely, experts on the work of Jenny Gilbertson.
Schedule
18:15 – 18:30 – Doors open, drinks on arrival
18:30 – 19:30 – Screening and performance of The Rugged Island
19:30 – 19:45 – Break
19:45 – 20:30 – Post-screening discussion
About the Rugged Island
The Rugged Island is a beautiful ‘story documentary’ made by pioneering Scottish filmmaker Jenny Gilbertson showing life, love and work in Shetland’s rural crofting communities.
Jenny’s husband-to-be plays Johnny: a young man torn between his duty to home and his love for Enga, with the promise of a new life in Australia. This tender and beautiful dramatisation of Shetland life surpasses the bounds of both fiction and non-fiction filmmaking.
HippFest commissioned one of Scotland’s most in-demand composer producers Inge Thomson to create a new live score for this remarkable film. The premiere at HippFest 2024 was met with a rapturous response. Thomson, herself from one of Scotland’s most remote crofting communities, brought in multi award winning Shetland fiddler Catriona Macdonald, and between them they make a soundtrack both ancient and modern.
About Inge Thomson
Inge Thomson is an award-winning musician who has been creating music for over 30 years as a composer, producer, lyricist, multi-instrumentalist and performer. Although best known as a long-term collaborator with The Karine Polwart Trio, in her own right Inge creates large scale multi-media works, produces content for radio and film soundtrack, performs and records in solo capacity and in cross-disciplinary collaborations including projects with scientists, visual artists, animators, theatre makers and textile artists. Recent high profile commissions include BBC Radio 3 Slow Radio piece Fair Winds (2022) and the 2021 BBC Na Trads Award nominated, Wild Edges.
About Catriona Macdonald
Catriona Macdonald is a proud bearer of one of the world's great fiddle traditions, that of the Shetland Isles. Catriona at once embodies the strength and spirit of her heritage with the freshness and diversity of a thoroughly modern performer and composer. Her superb playing and great charisma have established her a worldwide reputation as both a solo artist, and as a founder member of Scottish fiddle band Blazin' Fiddles and International string group String Sisters. She is currently a Senior Lecturer and Degree Programme Director for the BA in Folk and Traditional Music course based at Newcastle University.
About Shona Main
Shona Main is a writer and filmmaker whose doctoral research looked at Jenny Gilbertson's quietly radical ethical approach when living and filming with Shetland crofters in the 1930s and Inuit of Arctic Canada in the 1970s. Her films include Clavel (2014), a portrait of the Shetland crofter James Robert Sinclair, "The tent shall stand when the palace shall fall”: The tent that Essie built (2018) with the Highland Traveller Essie Stewart; and Wildie and Lalla (2021), a film about Jessie Saxby's love for her daughter, made with Catriona Macdonald and Angelica Kroeger.
About Sarah Neely
Sarah Neely is a writer, producer and researcher, working primarily in the areas of artists’ moving image and film archives. She is a Professor in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Glasgow. Her publications include Between Categories: The Films of Margaret Tait - Portraits, Poetry, Sound and Place (Peter Lang, 2016), and as editor, Margaret Tait: Poems, Stories and Writings (Carcanet, 2012), and Margaret Tait, Personae (LUX, 2020). She has also written about Jenny Gilbertson’s work, including a chapter situating her work in relation to other Scottish women filmmakers (EUP, 2014), and an article on the significance of her film, The Rugged Island, within the context of early sound film production in Scotland (Music, Sound and the Moving Image, 2018).
About HippFest
HippFest (est’d 2011) is Scotland’s first and only festival of silent film with live music, centred in and inspired by Scotland’s oldest cinema, featuring exceptional screenings, commissions, workshops and community events. HippFest undertakes year-round activity and has established a reputation for excellence in commissioning new music and touring.
For more information about HippFest, visit: www.hippfest.co.uk
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Image credit: Screening of The Rugged Island © Douglas Robertson, courtesy of Soundhouse Winter Festival.
Screening material courtesy of National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive.
This event is free, but ticketed.
You will be permitted to one drink on arrival, while stocks last.
If you have any access requirements, please contact ARCEngage@Glasgow.ac.uk.