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The film 'The Rugged Island', released in 1934 by documentary film maker Jenny Gilbertson, is an evocative representation of the life of fishing folk and crofters on Shetland through a dramatisation using the real crofters as actors. The story is of young love and thoughts of emigration but the film provides a striking portrait of the real community and their work through images of fishing, peat harvesting, sheep rearing, butter making, and ploughing, along with domestic scenes of the people and their homes. Gilbertson lived amongst the Islanders for the making of the film and this gives it an intimacy that is characteristic of her work. Jenny Gilbertson made several films of remote island life in the Shetlands including her first film 'A Crofter's Life in Shetland' in 1931 and 'Peerie Horses of Shetland' in 1965. She later went on to make several films of the Inuit people in arctic Canada in the 1970s. Both a silent and a sound version of film exist and were rescued and restored by the Scottish Screen Archive. The archive holds many films documenting community life, wildlife and the landscape in the remote Scottish Islands. These films include documentaries, newsreels, amateur films, anthropological films, tourist promotional films, and wildlife films of the Hebridean and Shetland island communities. For example the film 'St Kilda, Britain's Loneliest Isle' illustrates life on the remote and now deserted Hebridean island before its evacuation, and 'Eriskay - A Poem of Remote Lives' provides another striking study of crofting life. |
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