Penfest – Paper Portraits screening in the Town Hall

PAPER PORTRAITS – a community film, 2024
This is a film about the paper makers of Penicuik, which, for almost three hundred years, was a leading paper-making town in the UK. PAPER PORTRAITS is a unique project, created with the Penicuik Community Arts Association, based on interviews with local paper makers, written and directed by Gerda Stevenson, the cast of actors drawn from the local community. The film vividly captures the landscape and way of life of the mill workers, their families and communities living along the Esk – the river which fed the mills – and the great pride these people felt in their local industry.

Our wonderful film “Paper Portraits” involving almost 100 people in the local community has been screened at Penicuik Cinema to full houses three times already. It’s also been screened at the National Portrait Gallery to a packed audience, and in other art cinemas throughout Scotland. We are currently submitting it to Film Festivals.

Penicuik has a chance to see the film again on Sunday 7th September as part of Penfest 2025. It will be shown with “The End of Papermaking on the River Esk 2014 (U)” – a film by Allan Dickson, 2014 about the paper making process and its demise at Dalmore – live footage of the mill and its workers in the 1980s and 1990s.

People on the waiting list can buy tickets now.

Tickets will go on sale to the public on Monday 18th August 2025.