Sometimes I have a dream, maybe a fantasy, that the New Scottish Cinema becomes the hottest thing in international film culture. The phrase is on everyone's lips in every language on the five continents; there is no reputable film festival or cinémathèque in the world that does not run a retrospective entitled New Scottish Cinema; no film journal that does not carry in-depth analysis of the films constituting this startling new movement and extensive interviews with its writers, directors, producers, actors and camera-people.

Their qualities marked through exposure at film festivals, Scottish actors begin to appear in French, German, Italian, even American movies, and production executives from all over the globe start swarming into Glasgow and Edinburgh, their pockets bulging with co-production contracts. Even Scottish merchant banks sit up and take notice, and make their first tentative investments in an indigenous Scottish film industry.

Finally, the New Scottish Cinema enters the canon, taking its place alongside the great milestones of film history: Hollywood and Scandinavia before World War I; German Expressionist Cinema; Revolutionary Soviet Cinema; British Documentary of the 1930s; Italian Neorealism; French New Wave; Poland, Czechoslovakia, Cuba and Hungary in the 1950s and 1960s, and so on.

Then the dream, or fantasy, turns to reflection. Why is this not so? Why is there not a movement perceived as the New Scottish Cinema, and why is it not being celebrated in the way I have outlined? It is not because there are no films, or because there is a lack of indigenous talent or film activity. In the last decade or so the number of people earning their living from filmmaking in Scotland has risen eight-fold.