Dr Margaret Caroline Tait

Multi-talented Orcadian artist and poet, Margaret Tait, is considered today to be one of Scotland’s most innovative independent filmmakers. Although relatively unknown during her lifetime, she is now widely acknowledged as having made a significant contribution to Scottish culture through her films, art and poetry.

Born in Orkney on the day the First World War ended, she graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a medical degree in 1941 and served with the Royal Army Medical Corps throughout WWII in India and Asia. After the war, she worked in hospitals around the UK before moving to Rome in 1950 to spend two years studying filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.

Back in Scotland, Tait set up her own studio, Ancona Films, and moved between Edinburgh and Orkney before settling permanently in Orkney in the early 1970s. Her sensitivity to urban, as well as natural, environments is evident from her membership of the ruling council of the Cockburn Association, Edinburgh’s influential conservationist body, in the late 1950s.

Tait made over 30 films, most of which were self-financed, and published three volumes of poetry. Her films were largely about everyday life but she sometimes focused on significant events such as the protests against proposals to drill for uranium in Orkney.

In 1992 at the age of 74 she became the first female Scottish filmmaker to release a feature-length film, the only one she made, Blue Black Permanent. Despite a retrospective of her work being held at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1970, and her films being screened internationally, her work was less prominent in Scotland during her lifetime.

She is now recognised as having paved the way for women in the Scottish film industry such as Lynne Ramsay with her unique ‘film poems’.