Helena Gloag

A musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' classic ghost tale starring Albert Finney.

A headstrong young teacher in a private school in 1930s Edinburgh ignores the curriculum and influences her impressionable 12-year-old charges with her over-romanticized worldview.

Having left her husband, Hilary moves in with her unbalanced brother, Pink, who uses wit and humor to hide his amorous yearnings.

Stuck in a dead-end job, Graham Merrill adopts an otter, Mij, as a pet and then moves to an isolated village in western Scotland. Together they set out to explore the curious and magnificent natural wonders that surround their seaside home. Soon, Graham finds himself falling in love with the beautiful town doctor, Mary. Before long, the three become inseparable friends.

When Jamie's maternal grandmother dies, he and his brother Tommy are separated - Tommy is taken off to a welfare home and Jamie goes to live with his other grandmother and uncle. His life is far from happy, filled with silence, rejection and bouts of violence.

The first part of Bill Douglas' influential trilogy harks back to his impoverished upbringing in early-'40s Scotland. Cinema was his only escape - he paid for it with the money he made from returning empty jam jars - and this escape is reflected most closely at this time of his life as an eight-year-old living on the breadline with his half-brother and sick grandmother in a poor mining village.

Three stories reflecting life in the Orkney Islands, two set in the past, and one in the present.