Scotland’s largest festival for creatives continues this year for a two day conference. And you can enjoy all of it from the comfort of your home.
Despite the circumstances that continue to plague our day to day lives, the creative industry has pulled together and stayed strong in pursuing to deliver creative content for those who need it the most. ‘The We Are One Festival’ curated by festivals worldwide including Cannes, Venice and Tribeca to name a few, hit YouTube screens at the end of May and following suite will be Scotland’s Xponorth. The festival is now its sixth year and is available to follow from Wednesday 24th June – Thursday 25th.
The two day festival is funded by the Highlands and Islands enterprise, Creative Scotland and the European Regional Development Fund, showcasing a variety of talent in film, music, broadcasting and crafts. Originally, the festival was supposed to be held across venues in Scotland, however it will now be an online event. Viewers can sign up online to the event for free, and experience a line-up of guest speakers, workshops, events and films.
Headlining the event will be HBO producer – Richard Brown who is known for producing the infamous Emmy award winning TV series ‘True Detective’, starring Mahashala Ali as well as George Clooney’s Channel 4 mini-series ‘Catch-22’. He will be delivering a keynote speech on the events’ second day along with producer Diana Phillips. Phillips is known for producing the films – Wild Child and Alfie, starring Jude Law. Her upcoming film – Siberia featuring Willem Dafoe is set to be released this July.
Along with guest speakers from the film industry are those who work in the music business. Jeremy Yohai – Head of A&R at Concord is a music publishing company that is home to over 400,000 pieces of copyrighted music from “Uptown Funk” to “Here Comes the Sun“. He will be joining the event via livestream from the United States.
The festival is having a strong focus on the heritage sector. During this time of isolation, museums and other monumental sites suffer the loss of not having visitors explore their sites. Workshops and seminars will be held to expose these establishments and open up a discussion on how they can recover from Covid-19 in the near future. As far as film festivals go, it’s likely it will be some time before we can actually attend a physical one. However, Xponorth continues to pave the way for creativity and show resilience through this challenging time.
Words by Angelica Gayle
Disclaimer- all images used within this article have been sourced from Google. Ragged Culture Publishing Ltd. does not own the copyright to the images within this article. All rights reserved