Highlands and Islands Film Guild memories sought

Memories of the post war Highlands and Islands Film Guild coming to villages and rural communities are being sought by researchers at the Universities of Glasgow and Stirling. The visits were often an important social occasion for Highlands and Islands communities, many of whom had no access to television let alone cinema newsreels, public information films or the latest Hollywood releases. For very remote communities the Highlands and Islands Film Guild filled that important role. Those first hand memories of life in the Highlands and Islands and the regular visits of the Film Guild are what the research team are trying to capture when they visit the area over the coming year to carry out a series of case studies. The first of these will be in Inverness and Ross-shire and will coincide with the Inverness Film Festival starting on November 9th. The team, led by Dr Ian Goode, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow, will be on hand to record and document people's memories of what it was like when the Film Guild visited, the impact it had on remote communities over the decades and why they think it dies out in 1970. The Guild had broadly educational objectives to fulfil combined with a need to entertain their audience so they combined educational non-fiction films with feature films.