Professor Dr. David Cairns

Biography

David Cairns is a filmmaker and critic who graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art in 1991. He has created short films, including the multi-award-winning 'CRY BOBO' (2001), which is a ten-minute comedy portraying clowns as a persecuted minority. This work won a Royal Television Society award for Regional Programme and received over twenty prizes at festivals around the world. After struggling to get a feature film project off the ground, Cairns ventured into film criticism, starting a blog named Shadowplay which quickly led to commissions for Sight & Sound magazine and several online publications. Through this blog, he connected with filmmaker Paul Duane, and they collaborated on a feature documentary about the forgotten French film producer Bernard Natan, who has been largely erased from film history. This documentary was funded and screened at various prestigious film festivals, including the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival and the Edinburgh International Film Festival. In addition to this project, he also worked on a feature-length horror script titled 'Cell 6', which was filmed under the title 'Let Prey' and is currently under consideration by a major American studio. He aims to balance fiction and documentary filmmaking with criticism while continuing to teach part-time.

Research Interests