Culture and collaboration at the Celtic Media Festival in Newquay
Among the talks for delegates were "Tiktok or Telly?", "Celtic Exchange – Supporting the Next Generation in Creative Media" and "A BBC for All of the UK" featuring an address from the BBC's Director of Nations, Rhodri Talfan Davies.Azenor Kallag from Brittany, France works to create children's programmes in the Breton language, and was excited about increasing the use of social media platforms, saying: "I am thinking how social media maybe could help bring languages through people who are on it."I know it's not really healthy to be too much on it but I know that it's important to bring new content to the young people who are on it and give them a way to transmit languages."
That theme of the health of minority languages dominated many conversations at the festival.Coinneach Smith, producer at BBC Radio nan Gàidheal - the BBC's Scottish Gaelic language radio station - said: "In a media landscape dominated by English, seeing how others tell their own audiences' stories is very valuable, giving you a better understanding of how Scottish Gaelic broadcasting sits within that wider context. "Each Celtic language and nation's history, context, and modern experience is different - but there's a shared desire to give each community programmes that reflect their identity and voice."
'Stronger and more diverse'
Presenter Cathy MacDonald added: "As an international jury member for some years at the festival, I've observed that categories overall are markedly stronger and more diverse, despite a challenging industry landscape. "For me this suggests a growing confidence in our respective languages, enriched by that awareness of our shared cultural heritage within the Celtic nations. "Year on year we see a boldness in tackling difficult subjects within programmes that are all the more meaningful for being produced within the languages of the audiences concerned."
Alongside those who have travelled hundreds of miles were representatives of Cornwall, and the Cornish language.Director and Filmmaker Ted Simpson lives in Newquay and has been to a number of Celtic Media Festivals in the past, so could not miss the one on his doorstep.He said: "It's an interesting time, I think TV over the last few years has been in a tough place but what's really good to see about the Celtic media scene is the collaboration across different nations and the level of openness and access to this festival which is always really refreshing."You can strike up a conversation with commissioners really easily and get a real, honest sense of what's happening. But I do think the TV industry is in a tough place at the moment, there's not a lot of money going around."
Executive Editor at BBC Radio Cornwall Emma Clements said it was great to see "the shared pride and creativity" on show, adding: "Serving our communities and representing our distinct language, identity, cultural and sporting achievements not only to where we live but to the rest of the world, is so important."We can all reflect together where we come from, we can also work together to build a better future."I believe BBC Radio Cornwall plays a crucial role here, not just as a broadcaster representing the true lives of people in Cornwall on a national stage, we are the front door to the BBC, through BBC Introducing and Upload, our jobs and apprenticeship schemes."
The Celtic Media Festival was staged in Cardiff in 2024 and there has been a strong Welsh contingent in Newquay this week.Emyr Afan is CEO of Afanti Media, an independent media company based in Wales, and said: "Indigenous producers in Welsh or Irish or Gaelic communities need to get together more so we can not only celebrate our creativity in our indigenous languages but also to try to work together more.
"Such is the competition on other channels - your Netflixs and your YouTubes - we have to cut through, and money is getting shorter in supply, so therefore the greater the sum of the parts when there's more co-production."Llinos Wynne, Head of Documentaries and Specialist Factual at the Welsh-language television channel S4C had a similar message.She said: "I think bringing smaller countries together, bringing the Celts together, and being really creative and looking at how we can work together is as important as it's ever, ever been."
The Celtic Media Festival finished with the Torc Awards for Excellence - you can read a full list of the nominees and winners here.
Additional reporting by Ajit Gadekar, Coco Bond, Richie Wicks and Ella Cannon.
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Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
