After bringing the world's only film festival to accept fairy cakes for admission to the Highland town of Nairn last year, resident and Hollywood star Tilda Swinton is to reinvent the event with a touring mobile cinema.
Swinton, who lives in Nairn, put the seaside town on the map last year when she transformed the Ballerina Ballroom, a disused bingo hall, into a unique film festival venue, where the entrance fee was only £3, or free to those who brought home baking to share with their fellow audience members. Despite being dubbed an “anti-film festival film festival”, the eight-and-a-half day event, which had the grand title of The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, was an unqualified success.
This year she is will be touring an 80-seat mobile cinema across the Highlands, showing a selection of iconic road movies from across the world. The mobile cinema - known as the Screen Machine - will travel from August 1st to 9th, starting its epic journey on the West Coast and finishing in Nairn. Just in case anyone fails to notice the 37-tonne leviathan, the Screen Machine will, like an ice cream van play music . An entourage, either on bicycle or foot, will also at times pull the cinema, which is normally mounted on a truck. Tickets will be sold only to filmgoers who live at the scheduled stops.
Swinton is organising Pilgrimage: A Scottish Road Movie Festival with Mark Cousins, who also helped stage the Nairn event in August of last year.
She said their latest project would ensure that even more people gain access to their specially-chosen films.
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“Last summer, our Cinema of Dreams reanimated the Ballerina Ballroom, a long-treasured but dormant pleasuredome in the heart of Nairn, with the light of eight and a half days of cinematic journeying.
“This year, we make our journeying a physical reality. We test further our belief that cinema belongs everywhere and with everybody by making our festival mobile, and putting it, literally, into our audience’s hands.”
Mr Cousins added: “We will do something that has never been done before; pull a cinema across Scotland. Our project is a way of expressing our love of Scotland and movies and we hope to capture the imagination of movie lovers around the world with it.”
The full line-up of Pilgrimage, which is being supported by EventScotland, who contributed £9000 in funding, will be announced at the end of the month.