Sorcha Dallas

I saw a brilliant film a few weeks ago. But I’m sorry to say I don’t know when anyone will be able to see it on a cinema screen in this, the country of its creation. It was written in Scotland, made in Scotland, is about Scotland, and it is audacious and shocking and beautiful too.

Sadly, The Bedfords – a 15-minute film directed by young Glasgow-based artist Henry Coombes – will not be showing at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival. It has not been chosen for the short film section. It seems a very poor decision.

The film, which I managed to catch at its cast-and-crew showing, looks at Sir Edwin Landseer – the famous painter of the Highlands, hunting and the culture surrounding such pursuits – and his brief affair with the Duchess of Bedford, after he is invited to the Bedford’s Highland home to paint her family.

It is beautifully made, haunting, and some of its images are still resonating in my tiny brain. It offers a new and interesting take on so many things: the meaning of hunting, the power of the artist’s eye, the act of creation and the nature and problems of patronage. It has a taut little sex scene. It even has a great cameo by Scotland’s polymath genius, Alasdair Gray.

Coombes, going by the work I have seen, including his excellent contribution to Scotland’s 2007 Biennale is one of the country’s most interesting young artists.

His film concerns some aspects of Scotland – the veneration of its Highlands, the artist’s role in creating myths – which I thought would make it an essential addition to this year’s film festival, but maybe that is why I am a hack and not a professional film festival programmer.

All the same, it’s a real shame, for the festival and for Coombes, that it is not part of the EIFF, which is now running in the capital until June 28.

In wondering why it was not included in the festival programme, I considered whether it was deemed just a little too “arty” or “pretentious”. Coombes, after all, comes from the visual arts world rather than the world of cinema. He paints and draws and makes installations, too. Some of the film’s images are posed and stagy, but then so is the work of Peter Greenaway.

Last week I was in Venice for the Biennale – and going by that, the thin wall between visual art and film seems to have been completely demolished.

Steve McQueen, an artist who is now a film-maker, filled the official UK pavilion in the Giardini with a 30-minute movie. It may not have had much of a plot, but it is beautiful and definitely a film, not a piece of video art.

John Cale’s alternately troubling, pretty and finally shocking work for the Welsh pavilion – in which he waterboards himself- - was more of an art piece, but made with the accuracy and carefully measured editing and impact of a short film. Artists make film and film-makers make art: I hope all divides between the two worlds are erased in Scottish culture too.

There is, unlike in the film, a slightly happy ending to all this. Slightly obsessed by The Bedfords, I rang Coombes’s agent, Sorcha Dallas, who tells me it is going to be shown at the Zabludowicz Collection in London this summer. At least someone, sadly only south of the border, will be able to see it. If I were the BBC, I would snap it up right now and show it after Newsnight. Coombes is the real deal.