7 October — 6 December
2025
Glasgow, Dundee, St Andrews
In Autumn 2025 LUX Scotland will host three events as part of the 70th annual Flaherty Seminar in partnership with The Hunterian, Cooper Gallery and the Centre for Screen Cultures at the University of St Andrews. Expanding on the Flaherty Seminar’s 70th edition ‘ONWARD!’ held in New York City in June 2025, this series of Gatherings will present and bridge connections from films selected from the Seminar screenings which were programmed by Janaína Oliveira, Carlos Gutiérrez, and Richard Herskowitz, alongside programming partners Christopher Harris, Zaina Bseiso, and Louis Massiah. As unique and discursive events, each Gathering will offer the opportunity for the audience to engage in discussion as we explore the history and current movements in non-fiction filmmaking.
This programme has been devised to coincide with Margaret Salmon’s exhibition ‘Assembly’ at the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, and with Grace Ndiritu’s exhibition ‘Compassionate Rebels in Action’ (part of The Ignorant Art School) at Cooper Gallery, Dundee.
Tickets are free and available to book using the booking links below.
ONWARD!
In moments of great upheaval, can cinema provide fuel for a radical paradigm shift? What cultural momentum does the cinema offer us today? The very acts of making and watching non-fiction films are rooted deep in legacies of solidarity and resistance. How does this moment call on us to nourish those legacies and forge our own?
Onward! is a call to move through obstacles with collective action. Onward! is the call of the artist, the activist, the doula, the hopeful, the grieving – the people in the midst of painful transition. Onward! is animated both by the urgency of change, and the patience to know that liberation must come, will come. Onward! embraces the battlefield as the terrain of greater possibility. Freedom is an ongoing state of insistence that is carried forward in each act of making, questioning, resisting, remembering. Onward! is to stay the course and trust in the process of change.
Movement is not solitary. Onward! calls for collectivity, for curiosity, for entanglement, for hope, for solidarity across generations. Onward! is propelled by calls from the past, which too believed in the potency of the moment, and of all moments yet to come. Onward! celebrates coexisting and futurities.
Onward! is the irresistibility of resistance.
ONWARD! The 70th edition of the Flaherty Film Seminar took place from June 26 – 29, 2025. This special anniversary edition offered an immersive programme of screenings and carefully moderated conversations. As an internationally recognised forum for collective inquiry into the form and function of non-fiction cinema, the Seminar fostered field-building dialogue, encouraged the exchange of cinematic ideas across generations and cultures, and promoted the expansion of the limits of cinema itself.
Members of the LUX Scotland team had the opportunity to attend the Seminar in New York City with support from the ArtFund’s Jonathan Ruffer curatorial grants. We would like to thank Samara Chadwick (The Flaherty Executive Director), Juan Pedro Agurcia (The Flaherty Program Director) and Philippa Lovatt (Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews) for their help and support in devising these events.
Access
All films will be presented with closed captions and discussions will be live captioned.
A limited access fund is available to support audience attendance to each event, which can be used for transport or the cost of childcare, carers or support workers. This fund will be administered on a first-come, first-served basis, so please get in touch as soon as you can. For further information about access please email David Upton (Public Programme Manager) at email hidden; JavaScript is required.
The Flaherty
Now in its seventh decade, The Flaherty brings together people from diverse backgrounds to provoke dialogue and debate through the exhibition of innovative global media, thereby advancing and enriching moving image culture. The Flaherty’s mission is to nurture independent thought, ethical practice, and artistic innovation in the creation and exhibition of non-fiction cinema; to honor and build on our legacy as a watershed experience for generations of filmmakers, scholars, curators, and critics in demanding more from their own cinematic practices; to stand outside industry trends and political agendas as a forum to process complicated, difficult ideas about our world through non-fiction cinema; and to hold fiercely the belief that non-fiction cinema in its purest form is neither commodity nor propaganda, but an expression of the human impulse – a dream, a reckoning, an aspiration into the unknown.
The Flaherty Seminar is named after Robert Flaherty (1884 – 1951), considered by many to be the father of the American documentary. Flaherty’s seminal film, the 1922 ‘Nanook of the North’, is a work that history has recognised as the first documentary film, a cornerstone of ethnographic cinema, a modern art masterpiece, a racist fantasy, and an indefensible work of indigenous appropriation. He was also the creator of such classic poetic films as ‘Moana’, ‘Man of Aran’, and ‘Louisiana Story’. The Seminar began in 1954, when Flaherty’s widow, Frances, convened a group of filmmakers, critics, curators, musicians, and other film enthusiasts at the Flaherty farm in Vermont.
The Hunterian
The oldest public museum in Scotland, with collections spanning arts, sciences and humanities, The Hunterian is at the forefront of university museums around the world. Since it opened at the University of Glasgow in 1807, The Hunterian has been an invaluable academic and community resource. It is committed to becoming a more meaningful place for more diverse audiences.
The Hunterian collection’s historic foundation is a repository of knowledge that materialises the problematic history of modern Western society and its fundamentally colonial and capitalist underpinnings. Taking this as a point of departure and critical reflection, The Hunterian’s contemporary art programme seeks to interrogate the institution’s genealogy, and to introduce different perspectives into its spaces.
Working with a wide range of artists on acquisitions, commissions, exhibitions and events, our contemporary art programme allows The Hunterian to find new ways of using our historic collections to understand the world today.
Cooper Gallery
Cooper Gallery at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee is internationally recognised as a distinctive platform in Scotland for its radical curatorial research, international approach and focus on critical discourse in contemporary art and culture.
University of St Andrews Department of Film Studies and the Centre for Screen Cultures
Established in 2004, the Department of Film Studies is dedicated to the study of global cinema, moving beyond the canon of Hollywood and European film to engage with a diverse range of practices, cultures, movements, genres, and forms. Particular research and teaching strengths include work on documentary and non-fiction media, ecocinema and sustainability, and archives and cultural heritage, approached from anti-colonial, feminist, and queer perspectives.
Housed within the Department of Film Studies, the Centre for Screen Cultures regularly organises public events in collaboration with archives, arts organisations, and film festivals in order to promote dialogue across critical and creative practice — both within Scotland and internationally.
Closed Captions
Access Fund
Partners
Part of International Collaborations
LUX Scotland works with a range of trusted international partners to deliver projects in Scotland and internationally. Our international collaborations aim to expand the expertise, networks and audiences for Scotland-based artists, as well as bring new international moving image work to Scotland.