As it gets closer to the end of 2024, and at least some of us gear up for the holiday season, it’s time to both look back and look forward (presuming we agree that time is linear, maybe it’s the same thing…)
I was lucky enough to join Take One Action as director in early 2024 and the year has been a remarkable journey. We redesigned our whole strategy for the next four years, moving to a biannual film festival model in order to focus on building deeper, equitable relationships with partners across Scotland, and to prioritise staff wellbeing and health.
Next year we will be holding our first season of film festivals since 2023, and will be holding screenings, workshops and events in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness under the umbrella of Real Utopias – linking up global and local environmental and social struggles and solutions through film – from September through to November 2025.
A few of the topics we’re hoping to explore imaginatively and generatively through film, arts and discussion next year include:
🛖 Home
🤝 Mutuality
⚡Energy
🌳Rethinking wisdom
⌚Time and the archive
🎛️Collage and remixing
🌞All of us (inclusive environmentalism)
🏓Play as praxis
🍜Sustenance
We’re aiming to decentralise our programming and event design as much as possible – working with grassroots and community-led groups across Scotland to plan events that are locally relevant and globally connected. If you are, or know, a group you think we should be talking to, please let us know!
We’re in the final phase of crowdfunding for this – if you make a donation up until 27th December, your money will be doubled by Creative Scotland and you will help make our 2025 festivals happen. If you’d like to find out more you can check out our crowdfunding page, our Chappell Roan tribute or hear more from our patron, screenwriter and Ken Loach collaborator Paul Laverty.
To give you a flavour of our work, during the year we pressed forward with lots of screenings and events with old friends and with new partners. A few highlights of the year included:
Rewilding sign language and film We collaborated with Edinburgh Deaf Festival to hold a workshop, Filming Our World: Rewilding BSL & Queer Ecologies, for emerging Deaf filmmakers to produce work in response to the Scottish Sensory Centre’s Rewilding BSL project. This project led to the creation of over 400 British Sign Language signs for climate and environment-related terms, making climate action and environmental discussions more accessible for BSL users. The short film that came out of the workshop was then screened as part of the Signs for the Future short films strand at the Scottish Queer International Film Festival.
Something Fishy We worked with partners including investigative journalism coop The Ferret and food and arts organisation Becoming Climavore to host screenings of award-winning global fish farming documentary Until The End of the World in Edinburgh and Ullapool. The film looks at industrial fish farming as a complex food system linking geographies as far apart as Greece, Senegal and Argentina – and our discussions and guests linked these conversations back to Scotland and in particular the salmon farming industry here, and also highlighted solutions, such as Climavore’s Tidal Zone cookbook and bivalve murals.
To A Land Unknown We hosted a screening of Palestinian-directed film To A Land Unknown as part of Inverness Film Festival, including a recorded Q&A that our curator Xuanlin Tham did with director Mahdi Fleifel. Earlier in the year, one of our trustees, Meghan O’Neill, kindly hosted a gathering, Breaking Bread, Building Bridges, for us at Summerhall in Edinburgh, exploring how to have difficult conversations about Palestine and eating delicious Palestinian food from Sumud together.
Making Masculinities We collaborated with the Scottish Queer International Film Festival and Pillow Talk to host a sold out short film screening at Glasgow’s CCA interrogating the different shapes that masculinities can take – for better and for worse – and how these are created. We then welcomed actor, artist and activist Adam Kashmiry and academic Isaac Hoff to help unpack some of the themes that surfaced in partnership with the audience.
Summer gathering We held a big summer hang out and celebration at Edinburgh’s Biscuit Factory, where we welcomed friends of Take One Action old and new, shared our strategy for the future, and ate falafels, did eco-printing, film quizzes and workshops on film clubs and on imagining better futures.
Music and Resistance We worked with Saoirse Amira Anis, through Film Hub Scotland’s New Producers scheme, to hold a series of film events and workshops, Here, There and Everywhere, in Dundee exploring the role that music can play in social change, from education to subversion and healing. These events spanned such a range of ideas and practice, from exploring how our tech use has impacts in other parts of the world, to the historic role of rave music in political resistance to sonic healing through drawing on the universal. The great news is that Saoirse is staying on with us as events and co-production co-ordinator!
We also said goodbye to our chair Lindsay Dunbar, who has steered our ship calmly and thoughtfully for some time, and welcomed new co-chairs Tomiwa Folorunso and Aidan Nicol.