The First Tale
So let me explain for a moment how the film came to be.
In January of 2011 I was in the last year of a masters program at the Edinburgh College of Art. I had to make a final film, and while all of my friends were hard at work on their’s, I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do. I’d gone through several strong ideas for documentaries that had nothing to do with me, but none of them panned out.
Some of my friends were quite worried about me.
On January 25th we gathered at a pub to celebrate Burns Night, the birthday of Scotland’s most famous poet. And as we sat there, someone made a good natured crack about my hair and I ended up sharing a story about something random that happened to me while walking home one night. And my friends laughed. They’d never heard anything like it. So I told them another story about something really weird that once happened in a pub. Then one of them told me I should make a documentary about it.
I said no.
I was not going to make a documentary about my hair. I steadfastly refused. Then two of them, Daisy and Hannah, sort of teamed up against me. They both kept at it and I kept saying I did not want to make a film where I just complained about people teasing me. Then I remembered that I’d had a number of friends tell me they had “friends” who were crazy about men with red hair. But I never believed them. So I figured I could make the film a quest and just try to find one of those women and that way I never had to act like I was some sort of victim.
Almost three years later I have a 69 minute long film.
I managed to use a few of the stories I told that night in the film. I hired Cat Bruce, another former student from ECA, to animate them for me. I was so happy with the animations I asked her to animate the rest of my stories as well and I now intend to put them up on YouTube. I’m calling them Tales of Everyday Gingerism. Some are “worse” than others. I don’t think of them as abuse, or racism or anything, they are just weird. And all of them amuse me.
Here’s the first one. It happened a few weeks after I first moved to Scotland.
