All about Amy Hardie

  • Amy is blogging!

    Amy HardieJust a quick note to say that Amy Hardie, acclaimed director of The Edge of Dreaming and Head of Research at the Scottish Documentary Institute, has started blogging at Amy on the Edge.

    Her latest post is on why impartiality is not the right aim for her.

    We recommend that you sign up for updates from amyhardie.com, as Amy has some very exciting projects coming up!

  • Our first documentary PhD!

    We have our first documentary PhD by practice! Amy Hardie (The Edge of Dreaming) and the rest of the SDI team celebrated yesterday with champagne and strawberries at ECA's last independent graduation ceremony. Edinburgh College of Art merges with Edinburgh University from 1 August.

    But we have another ten PhD students with projects in the pipeline, so watch this space.

    To find out about post-graduate opportunities, please go to our website.

  • Stem Cell Revolutions

    Stem Cell Revolutions is an independent, feature length documentary exploring the history, development and ambitions of this fascinating field - from the first discovery of stem cells in the body to leading current clinical and scientific developments.

    The result of a close creative collaboration between scientist Clare Blackburn (University of Edinburgh) and filmmaker Amy Hardie, Stem Cell Revolutions features eminent international figures in stem cell research – including Nobel Laureate Sir Martin Evans and Sir Ian Wilmut, creator of Dolly the sheep – as well as acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood. Beautiful hand-drawn animations bring science to life on the big screen.

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  • Supetar Super Film Festival (SSFF)

    Last year Adrian McDowall and myself were invited to the beautiful holiday island of Brac in Croatia to show our films Ma Bar and Standing Start on an outdoor screen for the very first Supetar Super Film Festival. We found out that Scotland and Brac have something in common apparently - we're both reknowned for being tight! I'm not sure this is true but they thought it would be the perfect idea to invite us back as we have 'so much in common'!

    This year I programmed 13 films from the Scottish Documentary Institute's back catalogue including one feature doc, The Edge of Dreaming by Amy Hardie.

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  • DocsBarcelona & The Edge of Dreaming

    "What is your understanding of what happens at death? What have you really understood about life? Where do you stand politically?"

    The woman firing these questions at me in the marble lobby of a very stylish Barcelona hotel has an impossibly small waist. I think it’s the first time I have seen anyone whose waist you could, really, span with two hands. I should have admired her questions as well as her tiny middle, and said that of course I have no answers: I had nine years of exploring, 100 hours of film, distilled into 73 minutes to create a journey for an audience that brings them close to death, to grief, to fear, to letting go, and back to hope, to sensuality, to pleasure and to life. A shared experience of the sort that can hold contradictions, and is as rooted in the emotions, images, sounds, as in words.

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