In keeping with a Cinema Rediscovered tradition, we look to recent titles that have all the hallmarks of a future classic, and few films have earned that status as quickly as Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun. Her debut feature premiered to roaring reviews at Cannes 2022 and only went up from there, marking out the young director as a shining beacon of Scottish cinema.

Eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her single father Calum (Paul Mescal) are on holiday at a resort in Turkey, sometime in the late 1990s. Capturing their holiday on her miniDV cam, the time together seems idyllic, carefree, and shot through with nostalgia. And yet underneath Calum seems to be nursing something deeper than the cast which covers his broken arm. It’s a darkness which the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) is only just now able to pick up on in her memories, coloured as they are by the smell of suncream, cheesy karaoke moments, and chlorinated swimming pools. A fractured, melancholic elegy to parenthood and childhood nostalgia.

Screening alongside Aftersun is Scot cine-poet Margaret Tait’s short Portrait of Ga (1952), a moving portrait of her mother.

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