This film screened on Sunday 10th May 2015. 

We are delighted to welcome Mercury Prize-nominees Field Music to the IFI to provide musical accompaniment to seminal documentary Drifters.

In the film, director John Grierson – a pioneering Scottish filmmaker known for coining the term ‘documentary’ – follows the working day of a herring fishing fleet as they set sail from the Shetland Islands to battle the elements of the North Sea fishing grounds. Though influenced by Robert Flaherty, Grierson’s film is notable for its incorporation of characteristics of modernist cinema into its structure; indeed, the film originally premiered in a private film club in London in 1929 on a double-bill with Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.