First Contact (1983 film)
"First Contact" is the first documentary in what later became known as "The Highland Trilogy". The other two films are "Joe Leahy's Neighbours" (1989) and "Black Harvest" (1992). These three films, between them, have won some thirty major awards, included each film winning both the Grand Prix at the Festival Cinéma du Réel in Paris and AFI Award for Best Documentary.
Grierson Awards
John Grierson is widely considered to be the godfather of documentary film, and he has also been attributed to have coined the name "documentary". He was born in Scotland in 1898. Grierson was the founder of a new movement of documentary film in the 1930s. He started the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit, and in 1933 the GPO Film Unit, gathering together such diverse and exciting talents as Humphrey Jennings, Paul Rotha and Alberto Cavalcanti. His ground-breaking work on the Scottish herring fleet, "Drifters", had its premiere in 1929 alongside the first British showing of Sergei Eisenstein’s "Battleship Potemkin". In 1936, he produced the celebrated "Night Mail", directed by Harry Watt with script by W.H. Auden and score by Benjamin Britten.