Actress Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins, the former director of the Edinburgh Film Festival, are hitting the Highland trail with the first travelling film festival ever staged in the UK.

The new eight and a half day event, called A Pilgrimage, follows on from The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, which Swinton and Cousins staged in Nairn last summer.

Starting from August 1st, Swinton, Cousins and their team will be touring with a huge 80-seat, 37 tonne cinema, known as The Screen Machine, through remote communities on Scotland’s East Coast.

They will be holding digital screenings of films including Akira Kurosawa’s Macbeth-inspired Throne Of Blood (which will be shown in Cawdor), and Peter Watkins’ Culloden (which will be shown on Culloden Moor, the site of the battle that the film depicts.) It will also have a focus on road movies including Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (the opening film), Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale.

“It will have the same values as last year,” Cousins told ScreenDaily. “There will be a combination of an international range of films with affordable prices and a community (feel) and warmth. We feel that the multiplex experience is a bit cold and under-powered and under-passionate. We want to go the other way.”

The festival, which is backed by Regional Screen Scotland and Event Scotland, journey ends in Nairn where there will be further screenings of the movies shown on the road.



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