Swinton leads the chain gang pulling mobile cinema

Published on 10/06/2009 20:35

ACTRESS Tilda Swinton will lead a 70-strong team of film fans pulling a 37-ton mobile cinema across Scotland this summer, showing road movies in stops along the five-day route.

The Scottish Road Movie Film Festival – organised by Swinton and the film-maker and writer Mark Cousins – is an off-beat film festival they organised in the actress's home-town of Nairn last year.

They estimate it will take 70 volunteers manning ropes to take the Screen Machine – a mobile cinema on a lorry that opens out from its container – along minor roads from the west coast of Scotland to Nairn.

The "movie pilgrimage" will take in scenic villages and towns and iconic sites such as Loch Ness. The cinema will also take to the water at one point, Mr Cousins said, and will play music like an ice-cream van.

Swinton issued an invitation to "adventurers of every age" to help pull or escort the lorry.

She will be pulling with other volunteers for about three hours a day. The cinema will be driven at major junctions and up hills where necessary, and stop to show about three films a day.

"Along the highways and byways, through the hills and valleys, beside the exquisite and varying countryside of the Highlands, we will pull our magic box from the Atlantic to the birthplace of our Cinema of Dreams in Nairn," Swinton said.

In the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams last year, audience members sat on cushions in an exotically decorated cinema.

EventScotland , the events agency, is backing the mobile festival, between 1 and 9 August, with 9,000. Updates at www.a-pilgrimage.org.