The Trailer --

As I count down the days to the premiere of ‘Voyageuse’ at the Glasgow Film Festival on March 1st, I’m pleased to announce that the film can also be seen – for free – until the end of March. All I ask is you sign up here and I’ll send you an access code. You can also watch the trailer, which I only completed last week and only after several futile attempts to nutshell the entire span of the film into a neat two minute segment.

My early efforts at a trailer soon hit the skids, possibly because I tried too hard to link the film’s three key elements: romance, science and conspiracy. Not to mention its themes: of loss, of Erica’s struggle to belong, of her relationships with family and in the wider world and the tension of having to choose between marriage and what she believed was her lacklustre career. And what resulted…

Over the last few months I tried – and failed. Looking for inspiration I watched countless trailers and read what the industry wisdom had to say only to realise how ‘Voyageuse’ defies easy pigeon-holing. When Allan Hunter, the co-director of the Glasgow Film Festival invited the film to screen back in November, initially he insisted it was a documentary. ‘No, it’s not’, I countered, ‘it’s an authored piece of work, written and performed like any other narrative feature film.’ In the end, though, it hardly matters how the film is categorised so long as people watch it and, hopefully, are moved by it.

So far, I’m encouraged. This week I did a couple of interviews, one with the film critic and broadcaster Siobhan Synnot for the Janice Forsyth Show on BBC Radio Scotland, who is a great supporter of my work and another with Paul Risker, editor of Film Frame, who delayed our interview because, as he confessed, he was so rapt by the film and so profoundly moved by it he felt he wanted to see it again.

I also made the front page of ‘The National,’ accompanied by the heading, ‘How to make a film with no funding, no crew and a cast of only one.’ In a two-page profile, written by Nan Spowart, I even managed to sneak in the word ‘psychobiography’ which has to be a first for a Scottish newspaper.

As I grow increasingly nervous about ‘Voyageuse’ making its first public appearance, plus my Q&A with the amazing Dame Siân on March 1, I take great comfort from the many messages and shares on social media. As for the trailer, in the end I gave up on trying to condense the whole shebang into a neat little box, instead opting for a page-one premise approach rather than cover all the bases. In its first 24 hours online it attracted almost 1000 views which is remarkable.

So for anyone reading this post, can you do me a huge favour? If you’re on social media – Facebook, Twitter or Instagram – please follow and share my posts over the coming weeks. And if you can, please come along to the screenings of the film on Thursday, March 1 at 6pm and Friday, March 2 at 11am. I will be in your debt.

The above image is the poster for the film. The lipstick featured is one of Erica’s, together with a handwritten note on a torn Christmas card.