As doors closed March 13 on the 23rd Glasgow Film Festival (GFF), Scottish director Lizzie MacKenzie was awarded the Audience prize for her feature doc The Hermit Of Treig. The film concerns the reclusive Ken Smith who has lived for the past forty years in a cabin by Loch Treig in the Scottish highlands, with neither electricity nor running water. Smith made a surprise appearance at the film’s world premiere in Glasgow.
Of the seven films nominated for the audience award, five were directed by women. The Hermit Of Treig was the only documentary within the nominations.
MacKenzie told Business Doc Europe how she heard of Smith when she was running a restaurant in the Highlands. His cabin was a two-hour hike away, but she was prepared to make it.
“Deer stalkers from the area would come and sit in the bar in the evening and just tell stories about this old man,” se said. ”You hear about people like that in Alaska or Canada but I just didn’t imagine anybody in Scotland doing that.”
“I was so amazed by his sparkly eyes. He was living a life most people would consider poverty and yet he had this complete youthful energy, joie de vivre – just a spring in his step and a sparkle in his eye that you so rarely see in older people. You see it in children, that wonder and awe. I feel like people lose that so easily when they grow up.”
GFF co-director Allison Gardner commented of the film before its world premiere. “It is just one of those brilliant stories of the classic outsider. I mean, Loch Treig is really quite hard to get to, this man lives there without electricity and he lives off the land. This is a real spotlight on somebody who’s really chosen to be off grid.”
In total, 21 docs are selected for the festival, which ran March 2-13, five of which had a particularly Caledonian flavour. “What we try and do is programme without prejudice,” Gardner told Business Doc Europe. “It doesn’t have to be a world premiere, it doesn’t have to be a UK premiere. We try and look for great films that we know audiences will engage with and that applies across the whole program as well as the documentary strand.”
