“Jane McAllister captured footage of the referendum campaign during the summer of 2014 …slightly on the hoof, heavily pregnant and with no budget.” So reads the description of To See Ourselves, McAllister’s new documentary, on its Kickstarter page.
That sums it up. Nine years ago, the Scottish director was racing after her father Fraser McAllister with a movie camera as he campaigned tirelessly, and ultimately forlornly, for a “Yes” vote in the referendum on Scottish independence. (The documentary has featured this week in VdR’s Film Market.)
“It’s a personal film. It wasn’t really conceived in the way of, like, a big plan,” the director explains the film’s lengthy gestation. The project started when her father, then a Scottish National Party councillor in Musselburgh, agreed to help a friend who was filming footage for YouTube and social media in the run-up to the referendum. “He [the friend] was filming some meetings and filming my dad’s passion for the cause.”
The friend was a teacher with heavy commitments. He didn’t have time to continue the work. McAllister therefore stepped into the breach. She had just had her first baby and was keen to “get my hands on a camera again.”
As soon as McAllister attended one of her father’s meetings, she became obsessed. “It felt like history was happening. I felt like I was in a position to document it. So I carried on from there.”
The director was pregnant again. “I thought the baby was coming early and three weeks before the vote, I got somebody else in to help me film.” This lent an extra layer of family pathos to the documentary. At times, McAllister is seen on camera as, heavily pregnant, she pursues her father. “I thought it important to show that relationship. Normally in my films, I would never want to be in them, but for this one I thought it was an important dimension because you have to be honest about that [father-daughter] relationship.”
The nearer the day of the vote came, the higher feelings across the nation rose. McAllister was with her father during an Orange Order march attended by die-hard “no” voters who were bitterly opposed to Scottish independence. Several placed themselves in front of her camera to express their opinions in very fiery and forthright fashion. Her father may not have shared their views but he was still sympathetic toward them. “His interpretation of the Orange walk was more detailed and complex than most people have. He understands that a lot of it [the anger] comes from a place of fear and of lack of identity – and real poverty.”
McAllister shot huge amounts of footage, “so many hours…possibly up to 400,” she sighs as she contemplates the mountains of material. Her first cut of the film lasted a truly epic 17 hours. There is a TV version which is six x 40 minutes. (The cut she brought to Nyon clocks in at 112 minutes and is close to complete.) She calculates that she spent two years simply watching and transcribing, working out what exactly she had, while also looking after her young kids.
“The reason there is so much footage is that I didn’t have a plan…I was doing it on the hoof. When you don’t have a plan as a director, you are just catching mostly everything.”
Sometimes, especially when she was filming with her father at home, she’d leave the camera on in a room and wait to see what happened. This yielded some of the most magical moments.
Audiences know as they embark on the film that the referendum is lost and that independence isn’t achieved. That lends an added poignance to all those sequences showing Fraser on the campaign trail, always irrepressibly optimistic that the vote will be won.
Whatever the sting of the ‘no’, the film has plenty of observational humour. Some of it comes from Fraser’s enthusiasm and eccentric behaviour. At one stage, he is shown clambering into his car through the side window. It is parked so tightly that he can’t open the door.
“I don’t intend to make funny films but most of my films have an element of humour in them and I think that is because life is funny. Funny things happen…you’ve also got to make an entertaining film, as much as you need it to be truthful. You need people to sit and watch it and enjoy it.”
As for the unconventional way of jumping in the vehicle, that happened because Fraser was behind schedule for a meeting, yet again. “There were no other parking spaces. He is always in a rush. He is very often late…my dad is a bit all over the place, and he also doesn’t care what people think about him.”
Nor is the ending completely downbeat. McAllister has her baby – one obvious cause for celebration. Fraser, who was raised in an evangelical religious background, doesn’t give up on the fight. The battle for independence goes on. Just because you’ve lost one referendum, it doesn’t mean you are going to lose the next one.
Making the film gave the father and daughter a chance to “hang out together.”
“We have always been close. I’ve always known how passionate he was but I guess when I started following [him], I realised how much work he put in…and how tricky it was for my mum, because she wasn’t seeing him. He gets quite blinkered in that way.”To See Ourselves has obvious historic value. There aren’t any other films that chronicle in such intimacy, humour and depth one of the most seismic moments in recent Scottish social and political history. Anyone wanting to understand the fervent mood of the country in the summer of 2014 will find this a very good place to start.
