The Original Night

About this movie

The Original Night is a 16mm artist film project documenting Scotland's waning population of wallabies. Located on Inchconnachan in Loch Lomond, a small colony of wallabies have resided on the uninhabited island since their introduction by the Countess of Arran in the 1940s; once part of her private collection of exotic animals. Almost a century later however, proposals were put forward to cull the wallabies, which divided the local community, and raised broader concerns about the perceived ecological and environmental damage caused by 'alien' species. In light of a petition launched in 2022 to "Save the Wallabies of Loch Lomond", the fate of the colony was debated in parliament in 2023. In view of their likely demise, The Original Night looks to create a final portrait of Europe's last wallaby population, told through three semi-fictionalized 'acts'. In doing so, the project explores humans' longstanding fixation with the visual documentation of animals, from the inception of the cinematic form in Eadweard Muybridge's studies of animals in motion, to the prehistoric paintings of France's ancient cave artists. These histories, like the chronicling of America's wild horses, or Europe's native bears and mammoths, become an invaluable tool in chronicling the gradual demise of their subjects.

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