Making a film version of Alan Warner’s cult novel Morvern Callar required a filmmaker with guts and vision and it found it’s perfect match in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay who delivered this mesmeric, startling and sometimes baffling road movie that in the process affirmed herself as one of the most distinctive new talents in British cinema.

When 21-year-old Morvern Callar (a luminous and charismatic performance from Samantha Morton) wakes up on Christmas Day, she finds her boyfriend dead with his wrists slashed on the kitchen floor. Leaving her only a Walkman with a cassette compilation, a well-padded bank account and an address list of publishers to go with the novel he has written on a floppy disk. Almost without emotion, and seeing her opportunity to flee her dead-end existence and her job filling supermarket shelves, Morvern decides to take his money and send the novel to a publisher under her own name. If the motives behind those actions remain unclear, what should we make of her decision to then go partying, clubbing and do skipfuls of E, before heading off to Spain with her best friend Lanna. Perhaps she is in shock or maybe she is heading for a breakdown? Or is she actually emerging from a lifelong prison, liberated by her boyfriend's death? The question remains - just who is Morvern Callar? A vulnerable innocent, or a cold opportunist, as the central fact of her lover's death, now apparently an irrelevance, hovers provocatively over all of the above.

With traces of black comedy and psychological horror and featuring terrific sound design including songs by Velvet Underground, this unclassifiable, trance-like-enigma of a film, so gorgeously serene in its strangeness, found in its creator what was at the time perhaps the most confident new voice to emerge in British cinema since Mike Leigh.

Screening with Maya Deren’s short film Meshes in the Afternoon (1943) - one of the key films to influence Lynne Ramsay to decide to study filmmaking rather than still photography. Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in experimental cinema, using repetitive structures and iconic imagery, to construct a hallucinatory narrative that delves into the intimate subjectivity of its characters. A key early example of the ‘trance film’ it would serve as an inspiration to Ramsay when making Morvern Callar.

Onwards and Outwards is made possible with support from the BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery.

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