By Gavin Lundy (Ossian Scotland)

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I first discovered Alasdair Gray in my early teens. I was a Sci-fi/Fantasy boy, and my Dad always tried to point me towards Scottish writers. I made an attempt at Lanark, but it was too difficult, too weird. Of course, I didn’t get it at all.

Things moved on to 2014, around the time of the independence referendum. I had just turned 18 and something called me back to Gray’s work. When I read Lanark, it felt like defeating my final boss that guarded the way to the world of Scottish literary fiction. I’ve read it a few times since then, and it gets better each time.

Lanark taught me that Glasgow is a magnificent city.

Glasgow is a major character in almost all of Gray’s work. Sometimes a protagonist, often a mentor. The tension between Glasgow as the familiar Dear Green Place and as directionless Unthank as captured in Lanark frame the way I think about the city. Creatively, Gray still towers above this city, while his work interacts with us in the most modest of settings; the pub, the underground, having dinner at a restaurant.

Glasgow. Dull, dreary, decrepit Glasgow. Once so often reproduced creatively as a city of miserable people content to live in misery. But thanks to Gray, I’ll be having none of that! Liz Lochhead said that Gray ‘created his own Glasgow for himself to live in.’ and nobody has since described his work better. Now we all get to experience Glasgow through the Gray vision. A vision that celebrates the working class, our grand Victorian architecture, and our cultural heritage.

As you can imagine, I was delighted when I found out that Poor Things was getting a Hollywood adaptation. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos? Even better. But when I found out that this adaptation wasn’t filmed in Glasgow, has no Scottish cast, and has nothing to do with Glasgow or Scotland at all, it hurt.

It’s not that every film adaptation should be set exactly where the source material places it, or that it should remain completely faithful. That would be daft. It’s that Glasgow has a self-confidence problem and Gray is one of the few creatives to show us just how magnificent this city is.

These are questions Ossian is interested in. Our first video looked at the question of why Glasgow has so much lost architecture. Why have we been content to let Glasgow keep eating itself?

Our latest documentary asks why Scotland isn’t interested in (or capable of) adapting our own stories for the big screen. We have a large and growing film industry. Glasgow especially has welcomed many big-budget films here. More often than not, we are just a backdrop. A Highland vista, or a grand corner of Glasgow doubling as Chicago or New York.

This is a good thing. But while other wee countries like Ireland and Denmark host Hollywood while also creating their own cinema, which investigates and celebrates their own cultures, in Scotland we don’t seem to be able to do that to the same degree.

And that’s the Poor Things problem; is it okay to remove a story from a place that probably really needs it? Is it our own fault as a country that others get to use our best cultural clay before we do?

If you want some answers, you’ll have to go and watch our video (at the bottom of this article).

It has been almost a year since Jack and I started Ossian. We think that Scotland is full of questions and stories that aren’t being explored enough in the mainstream media, and providing some light on these is Ossian’s goal. We make short documentary videos on subjects that interest us, and we aren’t keen on producing the kind of algorithm-friendly YouTube dross that easily goes viral. Instead, we’re in the slow process of building a community based on a shared love of Scotland’s history, culture, and folklore.

Alasdair Gray was Scotland’s greatest 20^th century novelist. I understand that he didn’t entertain too much flattery, but he deserves to sit alongside the likes of Rabbie Burns and Walter Scott. If Ossian introduces a couple of cinephiles to his work, then that is good enough for us.

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