The making of Seachd - Part 2: And then there were Seven

After the success of the short film, Foighidinn - The Crimson Snowdrop, the producer Christopher Young and the director Simon Miller, really wanted to find a way of making a Scottish Gaelic feature film.  It certainly seemed to be the right time to attempt to raise the money, but what kind of film should it be?

Of course, there is an expectation that a Scottish Gaelic film might be set in the past since it was most widely spoken in the early middle ages, but with 60,000 speakers of Scottish Gaelic across the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, neither Simon or Chris wanted to make a film that would ignore the present day Gaelic community which is so vibrant and so strong.

Ideas sometimes come from the strangest sources, but in this case the kernel of the idea came from a mum.  Simon's mum who said:  "Well, you've made one of the virtues (Foighidinn means "patrience" in Gaelic), why don't you make the other six?"

And from that kernel came the idea that the story-telling grandfather from Foighidinn should be revived and given more stories to tell to his grandchildren enlightening them about the seven Gaelic virtues.  In Gaelic the word for the number 7 is Seachd - a number which has enormous resonance in Gaelic story-telling culture.  And so the project had a working title, which we haven't bettered to this day!

In this series:

The making of Seachd - Part 1: In the beginning