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Distribution problems for Scots filmmakers

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	Trainspotting launched the careers of virtually all its stars (pictured: Ewen Bremner, Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle)

While Braveheart drew on Scottish history, Trainspotting (1996), which was made by the same team as Shallow Grave, tapped into the zeitgeist of Scottish life and literary renaissance. The story of Mark Renton was the antithesis of the story of William Wallace. One was a patriot, ready to die for his country, the other a thief and a junkie, albeit an unusually insightful, articulate and witty one.

Trainspotting was an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's hit novel, which, like so much of the new Scottish literature, was contemporary and urban. Unlike Shallow Grave, Trainspotting was a hit in the United States. And while Shallow Grave launched the film career of Ewan McGregor, Trainspotting turned him into an icon. The cast also included Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald and Peter Mullan - the nucleus of what would turn out to be a new "Scot Pack" of international stars.

As well as acting in Shallow Grave, Braveheart and Trainspotting, Mullan was developing a parallel career writing and directing short films at a time when they were regarded as unfashionable and irrelevant.

Close (1994) was a dark comedy about an overprotective father, made for a few hundred pounds in the building where Mullan lived. His next film Fridge (1995), in which a boy is trapped in a fridge, was made on a larger budget under the Tartan Shorts scheme. As well as putting money into script development, the Scottish Film Production Fund was putting increasing amounts into shorts.

Tartan Shorts

Tartan Shorts was a new scheme in association with BBC Scotland. One of the first directors to make a Tartan Short was Peter Capaldi, who played the gawky oil company representative in Local Hero. Capaldi's surreal comedy Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life (1993) went on to win an Oscar and established Scotland at the forefront of short film-making.

Fridge would in turn win numerous international awards. Other schemes were set up, including Geur Ghearr to promote films made in the Gaelic language, still widely spoken on some of the Scottish islands, and other film-makers benefited.

Lynne Ramsay's shorts, Small Deaths (1995) and Gasman (1997), both won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. Her first feature film Ratcatcher (1999) was a rites-of-passage story about life and death in Glasgow in the Seventies. It possessed the same poetic, elusive and evocative qualities as her shorts and was an official selection at Cannes.

Mullan's first feature, as a writer and director, was Orphans (1998), a sometimes surreal account of how three men and a woman deal with their grief on the night before their mother's funeral, culminating in bloodshed and the insistence of the eldest son on carrying her coffin on his back - an inspired piece of black comedy.

Capaldi shot his first feature in Glasgow at the end of last year and it is now in post-production. Morag McKinnon, is regarded as one of the brightest of the current prospects. In her short film Home (1998), a council housing official has to visit two blind twins, a tenant who turns out to be dead and a man with a strange guest in his spare room.

Like so many of these short films, it displays a distinctly, offbeat Scottish sense of humour, far removed from the alternately polite and laddish comedy of English films. McKinnon is currently developing several projects at Glasgow's Antonine Films, a partnership between Paddy Higson, who was production manager on That Sinking Feeling back in the Seventies, and her daughter Frances Higson, who served as producer on Mullan's shorts and on Orphans.

On Orphans, Mullan and the Higsons had financial backing from the national lottery, another source of funds that has been enormously important in creating the Scottish film boom. In the early days of lottery funding, in the second half of the Nineties, Scotland put a lot more money (proportionately) into films than England.

It has been vital in helping Scottish film-makers step up from shorts to features. Mullan has blossomed simultaneously as an actor and a film-maker, winning the best actor award at Cannes in 1998 for his performance as a reformed alcholic in Ken Loach's film My Name is Joe.

The Loach effect

Loach and the Parallax Pictures company of which he is a director have become regular visitors to Scotland. Loach gave Robert Carlyle his first starring role in Riff-Raff (1990), which filmed partly in Glasgow, and the two worked together again on Carla's Song (1996), in which the story was split between Glasgow and Nicaragua. All three films had Scottish writers.

Hold Back the Night (1999) is another Parallax film, directed by one of Loach's colleagues, Phil Davis. A road movie, it follows two youths and an older woman up through Scotland to see the sun rise over an ancient stone circle on Orkney. Stuart Sinclair Blyth, as one of the youths, is the latest in an increasingly long line of young Scottish actors to play lead roles in Scottish films, something which rarely happened in the past.

But the new Scot Pack are managing to play Scottish roles without restricting themselves. McGregor went from Trainspotting to The Phantom Menace (1999). Carlyle was the villain in the last Bond movie and co-star in Angela's Ashes (1999). Dougray Scott, the Scot who romanced Drew Barrymore in Ever After (1998), co-stars with Tom Cruise in the next Mission Impossible film. Angus Macfadyen, who played Robert the Bruce in Braveheart, has just added another significant scalp to his belt, as Orson Welles, in Tim Robbins's film Cradle Will Rock (1999). Kevin McKidd and Shirley Henderson, two of the less starry names from Trainspotting, have major roles in Topsy-Turvy (1999), Mike Leigh's acclaimed new film about light opera.

On Orphans, Mullan was able to provide opportunities for other Scottish actors, including Stephen McCole, who subsequently went off to America to make Rushmore (1999) with Bill Murray. Mullan's story draws together the various elements that have helped create the film boom - raw talent, acting opportunities, short films and financial backing.

The short film schemes, the lottery money, Glasgow Film Fund and the film agencies (now pulled together into Scottish Screen) played important roles in developing an indigenous film industry.

But it is the success of films such as Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, Orphans and Ratcatcher that will ultimately secure its future.

Brian Pendreigh is the author of The Scot Pack and The Legend of the Planet of the Apes, which will be published by Boxtree in the UK in September.

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