LUX Scotland and the 70th Flaherty Seminar

Last Autumn LUX Scotland hosted three gatherings as part of the 70^th annual Flaherty Film Seminar in partnership with The Hunterian, Cooper Gallery and the Centre for Screen Cultures. This series of discursive events expanded on the Seminar’s 70^th edition ONWARD! Held in New York City in June 2025, this special anniversary edition was attended by members of the LUX Scotland team with support from the ArtFund’s Jonathan Ruffer curatorial grants. ONWARD! was programmed by Janaína Oliveira, Carlos Gutiérrez, and Richard Herskowitz, alongside programming partners Christopher Harris, Zaina Bseiso, and Louis Massiah, and reflected on the Flaherty’s history and continued its collective inquiry into the form and function of non-fiction cinema.

Each of these three events began with a screening, followed by food and breakout groups where participants were encouraged to discuss the programme within a non-hierarchal structure, inspired in part by the Flaherty’s commitment to ​‘non-preconception’ which Frances Flaherty said to be ​“the beginning of discovery”. We’d like to thank everyone who took part in these events that required a huge investment of labour and attention from the organisers and our audiences.

Our first event at Kelvin Hall, presented in partnership with The Hunterian, coincided with Margaret Salmon​’s exhibition Assembly. Salmon’s exhibition resulted from and reflected upon a process of community outreach, story counselling and cinematic experimentation, encompassing a film, photographs, and sculptures in an installation that expanded over time. For ONWARD! we paired together two films that explore gendered labour in the different socio-economic contexts of Cuba, thirteen years after the Revolution, and Britain during the dramatic changes of 2020/​21: Sara Gómez​’s documentary film​‘Mi Aporte’ (1969) and Salmon’s​‘Icarus (after Amelia)’ (2021). We were joined by Salmon and writer and poet Helen Charman to convene the discussions and discuss Charman’s new book Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood.

Our second gathering took place across Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and within Grace Ndiritu​’s exhibition at Cooper Gallery. Ndiritu’s exhibition Compassionate Rebels in Action (the culmination of Cooper Gallery five part project The Ignorant Art School) centered ​“practices of radical spirituality, pedagogy, social justice, and decolonisation as compassionate and holistic means to achieve new ways of ​‘being together’ in these unprecedented and unpredictable times.” We paired together William Greaves’ iconic work of cinema vérité ​‘Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One’ (1971) with Ndiritu’s ​‘Black Beauty’ (2021). First shown at the Flaherty Seminar in 1991, Greave’s iconic work returned to the 70^th edition and reflects a similar hallucinogenic ​‘film-within-a-film’ as ​‘Black Beauty’, blurring the boundaries of the documentary and narrative forms. We were particularly excited to bring ​‘Symbiopsychotaxiplasm’ to Dundee, following Ndiritu’s presentation of the film at our Weekend Residential event at Hospitalfield in 2022.

Our gatherings concluded in St Andrews in partnership with University of St Andrews Department of Film Studies and the Centre for Screen Cultures. We presented five highlights from across the ONWARD! programme, in a screening exploring transit, movement, fiction, destruction and appropriation across colonial cultural and geographic lines. These films were​‘Take Your Bags’ (1998) by Camille Billops,​‘Al Mahatta /​The Station’ (1989) by the Sudanese Film Group,​‘A Plate of Sardines’ (1997) by Omar Amiralay, Moune Ô’ (2022) by Maxime Jean-Baptiste, and​‘Vers les Colonies /​Towards the Colonies’ (2016) by Myriam Charles. We’re excited to return to St Andrews and continue our collaboration with the Centre for Screen Cultures in summer 2026.

We would like to thank all of the artists for taking part, live captioner Louisa McDaid for her work captioning all three discussions, and Valery Tough for providing captions for the films. We’d also like to thank Samara Chadwick and Juan Pedro Agurcia at The Flaherty; Dominic Patterson at The Hunterian; Sophia Hao, Peter Amor, Lewis Cavinue and Rhona Jack at Cooper Gallery; Dr Philippa Lovatt, Professor Lucy Donaldson and Professor Tom Rice at the University of St Andrews Film Studies Department and the Centre for Screen Cultures for their help and invaluable support in devising these events.