Les Wilson

The story of the remarkable family who tamed the wild Scottish coastline, told 200 years after the building of their first iconic lighthouse, the Bell Rock. For nearly 150 years, Robert Stevenson, his sons and grandsons designed many of the lighthouses around Scotland's coast. His sons Alan, David and Thomas also became lighthouse engineers. His grandsons (David's sons) David Alan Stevenson and Charles Stevenson designed lighthouses too.

A documentary exploring the life and work of experimental Scots-Italian filmmaker Enrico Cocozza through excerpts from his films and interviews with those who knew him. Cocozza gained recognition on the amateur film circuit during the 1940s and 1950s, but his work was largely forgotten in later years. In old age, he became deeply anxious that The Golden Fry—the chip shop beneath his flat, in premises that had once housed his family’s café—might catch fire and destroy the films he kept in storage. This fear ultimately led to his collection being deposited in what is now the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive, allowing his remarkable body of work to be preserved and rediscovered. Created with limited resources but extraordinary visual ambition, Cocozza’s films were, in the best sense, “cheaply extravagant.”

Writer Alan Bissett explores the complex brain of Robert Burns in a quest to discover the real man behind the myths and reveal the conflicts in his life and work. Burns was a poetic genius, but full of contradictions. He was a lover of women, and an exploiter of them; a Republican firebrand, and a social-climbing government excise man; an advocate of freedom who almost became a Caribbean slave master. Alan examines the groundbreaking research that suggests that the poet suffered from bi-polar disorder, a condition that led him to have severe mood swings.