AUTHOR’S NOTE

    Nowadays, Scotland’s defined and unique identity is exported throughout the world via an abundance of imagery which unfortunately is becoming more and more caricatured.

Scotland equally, however, has maintained a privileged relationship with France for ever seven hundred years. This ‘Auld Alliance’ allows the two countries to continue to share important artistic and cultural exchanges such as the Festival de Lorient  or  Glasgow’s Celtic Connections during which the long lost cousins can pay each other homage.

The Clichés Ecossés project will keep in line with this complicity, and re-inventing it at the same time, as is the role of each new generation. This re-inventing will be evoked as much by the project’s literary content as by its theatrical continuation, led by a Scottish director living in Paris, Joanne Allan who will adapt the book for the theater in the autumn 2009.

Each of the ten short stories which will make up the book Clichés Ecossés will treat one of the ideas, fantasies, which have been feeding my imagination of a french girl since my childhood as the Whisky, the Ceilidhs or the Piping.

The leitmotif of this documentary tales will be given by my perspective. Each story will be written according to my own feelings. Putting Scottish people themselves at the heart of the telling, it is through their experiences, live and retold, their personal atypical environment that I want to explore the country, all the time allowing myself to be taken in by the rugged landscape.

Because if it’s true that a country makes a man, it is also true that just a man can carry in him the spirit of an entire country.

Isabelle Gilbert