Glasgow Film Festival review: Bill Douglas: My Best Friend

This documentary about the influential Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas may be framed as a personal story, but in the end it works better as a concise primer, writes Alistair Harkness

Bill Douglas: My Best Friend ***

“If you’ve never seen a Bill Douglas film and you’re any kind of filmmaker you should see a Bill Douglas film. I mean, really, get a grip.” Lynne Ramsay there, being amusingly matter-of-fact about the under-seen Scottish filmmaker’s importance to world cinema. Putting him in the same bracket as Kubrick and Tarkovsky, Ramsay’s testimony in the opening scenes of Jack Archer’s slim documentary is backed up by the fact that there’s no better advert for the power and influence of Douglas’ autobiographical short films My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home (collectively known as “The Bill Douglas Trilogy”) than Ramsay’s own debut Ratcatcher.

She’s not the only world-class filmmaker to revere him, either. Room director Lenny Abrahamson is also on hand to deconstruct just how much Douglas’ enigmatic approach to character and storytelling subverted the demands of mainstream cinema – and the film also skims through the extent to which Douglas’s career was thwarted by the poverty of the British film industry in the 1970s and 1980s, when he managed to complete only one full-length feature (the 1986 epic Comrades) before his death from lung cancer in 1991, aged just 56.

But as the Trilogy-homaging title indicates, this is also supposed to be a portrait of his life-changing friendship with Peter Jewell, whom he met at 18 while doing National Service. It was through Jewell that he managed to escape the appalling conditions of his own upbringing in the Edinburgh mining village of Newcraighall, embracing the bohemian life London offered in the 1960s and becoming Jewell’s lifelong companion in the process. Jewell insists their relationship was platonic, yet he talks about Douglas with a romantic intensity that the film is a little coy about exploring. The result is a documentary that’s framed as a personal story, but works better as a concise primer.

Bill Douglas: My Best Friend screens at Glasgow Film Festival on 8 and 9 March.