Lowland Kids + Q&A
Saturday, 13 September, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Location
Montrose PlayhouseThe Mall
Montrose, Angus, Angus DD10 8NN
United Kingdom
Google map and directions
Scottish Premiere. As rising seas swallow Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, two Indigenous teenagers - Howard and Juliette - and their uncle Chris face a heartbreaking decision: whether to leave the only home they’ve ever known. Dubbed America’s first climate refugees, they are part of the country’s first federally-funded mass relocation project, a programme thrust upon a people whose culture is woven into the marshes they leave behind.
Filmed with striking intimacy and visual poetry, Lowland Kids follows the family as they navigate grief, resilience, and identity in the face of irreversible change. From the bayou’s haunting beauty to the sterile uncertainty of the New Isle, director Sandra Winther captures a deeply personal story that reflects a growing global crisis.
This is a powerful meditation on place, belonging, family, and the human cost of climate collapse, told through the vibrant, defiant voices of youth growing up with one foot on land and the other already in the water.
🎤 Followed by online Q&A with director Sandra Winther
💬 Post-film Q&A will be live captioned (CART). Learn more about access at the festival →
Director: Sandra Winther| Country: USA/Denmark | Year: 2025 | Running Time: 94 min | Language: English | Rating: 15 | Content guidance: contains references to addiction and death.
About the filmmaker:
Sandra Winther is a Danish film director based in New York whose work captures vibrant youth culture and climate-driven stories with striking intimacy and lyricism. Her acclaimed documentaries include Lowland Kids (which first premieres as a short film at SXSW in 2019) and A New Wave (New York Times Op-Doc, 2024). She received the ‘Filmmaker of the Future’ Award at the Rhode Island Film Festival (2019) and the Nowness Award for Breakthrough Artist for Cultural Excellence in Film and Video (2020), recognising her bold cultural voice and cinematic vision.
With short film:
In the Flame We Reveal Ourselves + live music performance
World Premiere with live music performances! A haunting, wordless hymn to our burning, beautiful world. An audio-visual odyssey paired with Afterlands’ soundtrack.Through flickering landscapes and historical echoes, it reveals how destruction, complicity, and devotion burn together, inviting us to feel climate grief and spark the hope that emerges when we face the flames.
🎤 Followed by live Q&A with director Virginia Heath and producer Grant Keir.
🎵 Live music with Afterland’s Rick Anthony.
💬 Post-film Q&A will be live captioned (CART). Learn more about access at the festival →
Director: Virginia Heath | Country: UK | Year: 2025 | Running Time: 15 min | Language: English | Rating: PG
About the filmmakers:
Virginia Heath is a BAFTA-nominated writer/director known for award-winning documentaries and dramas. Her feature From Scotland With Love (2014) screened with live performances at the Edinburgh International Festival, Barbican, and Celtic Connections. She won the Berlinale Short Film Prize for Relativity (2002) and and received a European Film Academy nomination. Virginia has directed arts documentaries for Channel 4 and the BBC and won a National Film Board of Canada/Sheffield Doc/Fest award. Recent works include Cigar Box Blues (BBC1/BBC4, 2021) and Three Chords and the Truth, which screened at Woodstock and Nashville. Her drama Lift Share won Best Short at Copenhagen Film Festival in 2019.
Grant Keir is a producer and founder of Faction North, with over 25 international feature films, documentaries, and hybrid projects to his name. His co-productions include Off the Rails, The Artist and the Wall of Death, and the BAFTA Scotland-nominated From Scotland With Love. A respected mentor and tutor, he has worked with Dok Incubator and Finland’s ground-breaking AVEK mentoring programme, 'Kehittamo', supporting the next generation of filmmakers through development and industry launch.
About the musical performer:
Rick Redbeard is the solo moniker of Scottish musician Rick Anthony, best known as the lead singer of Glasgow’s much-missed The Phantom Band. In 2024, he released We Are the Animals in the Night with new project Afterlands, a collaboration with Davey McAulay and Jill Lorean, on Lost Map Records. A distinctive voice in Scotland’s alt-folk scene, Rick is currently completing his first solo release since 2016’s Awake Unto, combining poetic songwriting with an atmospheric, genre-defying sound..