Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh until Thu 07 Mar

Nick Higgins / UK / 2013 / 98 min

What do you get when you mix 50,000 Scots with video cameras and the brief to make a short film about their country? One can only guess at the chaos filmmaker and academic Nick Higgins had to wade through to whittle the resulting 1,500 submissions into this 98 minute documentary. Not that the disorder has been entirely tamed: We Are Northern Lights is a shambolic, diverse, funny, touching and ultimately joyous celebration of modern Scotland.

Scots have plenty to say. So it’s no surprise that this project, initiated as part of the Year of Creative Scotland 2012, garnered a huge response. From comedy quarrymen to guerilla beekeepers, Scots from every imaginable background and every corner of the country emerged to add their tupp’orth. Passionate discourse on Donald Trump’s land-grab attempts and pleas on behalf of displaced asylum seekers, parenting advice from heroin addicts and cautionary tales of walking the West Highland Way are just a few of the tales Scots have chosen to tell. And of course it is all punctuated by plenty of impressive scenery.

It’s not a complete success: some contributions veer from enigmatic into incomprehensible and there are fragments that seem to contribute little to the finished film. There are several clips that seem like natural endings but there is more to come, which means this can feels overlong. A documentary about Scotland which is funny, poignant, beautiful, frustrating, passionate, joyful, silly , contrary and uplifting – it’s difficult to imagine a more accurate portrait of this country.