The newly-appointed chairman of the Scottish Screen Agency Allan Schiach outlines his ambitions for Scottish cinema.

Recorded on the closing night of the 1996 Edinburgh Film Festival, this edition of STV's Festival Cinema sees presenter Dougie Vipond interview Allan Schaich, screenwriter of films including Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) and Castaway (1986), and more recently the hit series The Queen’s Gambit (2020), on the occasion of his appointment as chair of the newly-formed Scottish Screen Agency. Schiach had previously been a governor at the BFI, and the chair of the Scottish Film Council. Schaiach had given the Bafta lecture at the festival that year, which was a banner one for the Scottish film industry, having seen the release of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, the huge success of which seemed to confirm a sense that Scottish cinema was on a roll following the earlier successes of Shallow Grave (1994) and Small Faces (1995).

Schiach argues that the Scottish film industry needs to bring its various production and funding bodies under the one roof. His ambition is to create an industry that can operate at a sustainable level, and which makes films with the potential to succeed in overseas markets.