"Sometimes, we can never return to a place we once belonged…"

The Blackening is a character-driven, engaging drama of international appeal involving universal themes of family, return from exile and marriage.

The film tells the story of the return of a prodigal son, Magnus, a failed dot-com millionaire, forced to seek financial help from his family to marry his Argentinian fiancée. To do so, he must face the traditional blackening ceremony, now controlled and manipulated by his older brother, with family scores needing to be settled.

The Blackening takes its name from a pre-Christian marriage tradition of blackening faces as a good luck symbol, still practiced in rural northern Scotland today, but now transformed into horseplay involving stripping the captured bridegroom and blackening his naked body.

Set among the panoramic landscapes, seascapes and stunning skyscapes of the Shetland Islands, not seen on cinema screens since a 1937 classic of the British cinema, The Blackening homes in on human conflict between insiders and outsiders, new values versus old values, the local and the global.

Drawing on influences from two Scottish-inspired classics of British cinema, Michael Powell’s Edge of the World (1937) and Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going (1945) and the family claustrophobia of Thomas Vintenberg’s dogme testament Festen, The Blackening also takes a lead from a rich tradition of Scottish film drama (Bill Douglas and Christopher Rush.)

The Blackening is brought to the screen by a collaborative creative team who develop across the internet:

Alec Bruce, a writer with a distinctive voice, a product of Moonstone International screenwriters laboratory. He developed the original Blackening concept on a Royal Academy of Dramatic Art writer’s course in London.

Leslie Lowes, who learned his production skills with the BBC, is no stranger to the Shetland location, having lived there for over 20 years and recently, located the feature Devil’s Gate to the islands.