The Beginner’s Guide: Jeanie Finlay, Director

It’s not often that you can say that someone is one of your favourite directors, but for a long time you didn’t even know their name or recognise that all the films you liked were theirs. Jeanie Finlay is a special case though, the documentarian who pushes you hard to look at the subject and never at themselves. Through her good working relationship with the BBC I and many of you in the UK have been watching her films without ever actually joining the dots and seeing that Finlay was the filmmaker behind them all. For anyone outside of the UK I hope this article serves as a good introduction to her work.

Finlay is an artist and filmmaker with a penchant for music documentaries. Her filmography is short but ever so sweet. Intrigued by places or events its her pursuit of the people in and around them that makes her work stand out. She is a storyteller, a documentarian, a detective, and the benign voice behind the camera who questions the impetus of its subjects to do what they do. Her documentaries are captivating and unique, and only the beginning of what is sure to be a great career.

Early Work

Finlay is an artist as well as a filmmaker and often these two mediums play into one another. Finlay had her first foray into filmmaking with Love Takes, a short documentary about love and how it affects us at different ages. While short, the documentary raises a question in the audience’s mind, and as a production it shows the emerging stages of Finlay’s interest in film as an investigation into how people work. Her art projects “Ever Fallen” and “Longing” appear to be inspired by or were the inspiration for this film. It’s evidence that Finlay’s questioning nature never truly ends.

Following on from this, Finlay made Teenland. A one-hour long documentary investigating the lives of four teenagers, their bedroom spaces, who they are and what they hope for the future. She followed this with the feature-length Goth Cruise, a documentary in which Finlay, inspired by her own teenage years as a goth, explored what it meant to be a goth and how people adapted this cultural identification to their ‘normal’ daily lives. For this documentary, Finlay and her crew boarded a cruise ship where, among the regular guests, a convention of goths regularly takes place. The film is surprisingly revealing in how those who live the goth lifestyle differ, and also in how poorly their American counterparts are treated.

In 2010 Finlay made the short Nottingham Lace, about the last of the Nottingham lace makers. Then, while in the middle of her ‘music trilogy’ she made Pantomime, a feature documentary about a small community and the amateurs hoping to keep their theatre afloat with a production of Puss In Boots. In these, as in all her work, Finlay delves into people’s passions and interests, and attempts to demystify what such things mean to their well-being and self-identification. Finlay’s talent for seeing into the most ordinary seeming of people is brought to light in her trilogy of music documentaries.

The Music Trilogy

Not officially a trilogy, but somehow feeling that way, there is no doubt that these three documentaries share a common theme and are ultimately Finlay’s finest films to date. In 2011, Finlay made Sound It Out. Unlike some of her other productions, the making of this documentary was very uncomplicated, occasionally consisting of simply Finlay and a camera. The documentary situates itself in Sound It Out, the last record shop on Teesside (England).

Initially telling the story of the shop’s owner, Tom, workers, and customers, the documentary then follows them home (quite literally). Finlay visits with the customers and engages them in their passion. She explores why music is so important to them, how it affects their mindsets and most importantly what this small record shop means to them.

While Teesside was already a low income, low unemployment area, Finlay also filmed this documentary as the recession was properly underway and much is gleaned from the customers experience of unemployment, personal problems, and how their love of music goes some way to healing the gaps in their lives. But this isn’t a dark story, and Finlay never reaches so deep that we give up hope for these people.

Sound It Out is an uplifting film and one which shows humanity and its love of music in all its various guises. From the bloke who heard a song in the pub, to the lads who find an escape through metal, to the hard care Status Quo fan, there’s a place for everyone.

If Sound It Out is the nice and uplifting side of the musical psyche, The Great Hip-Hop Hoax is its dark side. In the early noughties, when Eminem was making waves over here in the UK Scottish teenagers Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain were trying their hand at rapping, and were surprisingly very good at it. But when they set their sights on success, fame and ultimately London, they discovered that many people saw Scottish rappers as something laughable. Seeing that their origins were getting them nowhere they jokingly decided to don American accents and pass themselves off as Californians. This one joke got them a gig, their careers took off, and then everything began to spiral out of control.

The Great Hip-Hop Hoax is a superb documentary and certainly my favourite of Finlay’s work. Told a decade after the fact, Finlay unfolds a compelling narrative, slowly peeling away at Billy and Gavin’s experience of their success and the pressure of the lie they had created. Surely the tipping point of Finlay’s career The Great Hip-Hop Hoax is an extraordinary insight into her capabilities as a documentarian, one who is thorough, unbiased, but who is skilful in her construction of an entertaining narrative.

Following The Great Hip-Hop Hoax Finlay made Orion: The Man Who Would Be King, her most recent and most successful film. Bigger and more expansive than any of her earlier productions, Orion tells the story of Jimmy Ellis. A singer who sounded so much, and even looked like, Elvis that he found it impossible to begin his own music career. Upon Elvis’ death in 1979, however, producers and managers jumped on an opportunity to make him into Orion, a mysterious ‘reincarnation’ of Elvis.

Orion is a heartbreaking tale of a man who wanted to be heard, but could only ever achieve the success he desired by wearing a mask. It’s about his struggle between the man he was, the man he wanted to be and the man (and industry) that got in the way. Told with a thoroughness and tenderness, Orion is also the most cinematic of Finlay’s films, and takes her work up into the echelons of major documentary feature making. Indeed, for this she won the BIFA Raindance Award and has garnered a wealth of critical acclaim.

Detective Documentarian

So many documentarians don’t know how to tell a good story, or an informative one. Those who do, however, usually find themselves working on ground already trodden on by journalists or TV documentary series’. What makes Finlay different is that she goes looking for stories, and when she finds them she goes into their darkest corners to explore them in minute detail. This makes her work surprising, and because of her ability to see these tales with a storyteller’s eye, engaging too.

What makes Finlay unique, to me, is her ability to set herself apart from the documentary. Her thoughts and skill lie like fingerprints all over her films, but she never becomes part of the narrative. Other documentarians become entangled in their stories, and while I can appreciate the entertaining aspect of seeing their relationship with their subject unfold, it can also make you question their objectivity. Finlay, however, is a gifted, thorough, observer, like every good documentarian should be.

The Future

The future looks bright for Finlay and following on from her success with Orion I would hope that she will now find funding a little easier (having occasionally crowdfunded in the past). Though considering how long she has been working on some of these previously mentioned documentaries, we may have a while to wait until we see anything as large and impressive as Orion. Finlay is currently making a documentary about Indietracks 2015 (a festival where indie music meets railway enthusiasm) and it will be interesting to see what impact producing more dramatic stories has had on her documentary skills.

Finlay has a good relationship with the BBC, her documentaries occasionally being co-produced by them and her work often shown under the BBC Storyville banner. So, unlike many documentarians, her work is presented to a wider audience than feature documentaries usually illicit. Because of this I have great hope for Finlay’s future, and the audience she will no doubt accrue following Orion’s success.

Finlay operates a very informative and up-to-date social media presence. Many of her documentaries are available on DVD or for streaming. If you’d like to learn more, or watch some of the documentaries mentioned above visit her website or follow her on twitter @JeanieFinlay.