A DOCUMENTARY celebrating the workers and machines of Scotland's traditional weaving industry, while also exploring the urgency of preserving the disappearing craft, has been praised globally.
Director Callum McCulloch-Nowlan’s debut film The Weavers follows two parallel stories, one of 85-year-old Rob Beaton, who is Scotland’s oldest and longest-serving mill worker and that of a young apprentice who is learning the trade, and the ancient rhythms of the looms.
McCulloch-Nowlan said he was inspired to make the short 10-minute documentary after he learned about Beaton’s story.
Beaton, who works at Andrew Elliot’s mill in the Borders, has produced tweed for Dolly Parton, and fabrics used in the likes of Doctor Who, Outlander, Braveheart, Harry Potter and James Bond.
However, he has insisted he cannot retire until he finds an apprentice to take over his job.
He is one of Selkirk’s last bespoke weavers and has spent five years trying to find the right candidate to take over from his work, but to no avail.
“As soon as I read Rob’s story, I was like, that's the story. That's a film I want to make,” McCulloch-Nowlan told The National.
Despite The Weavers being McCulloch-Nowlan’s debut film, he has spent countless hours working on big productions for the likes of Netflix, Apple TV and Hulu, and has turned his expertise into his own project.
He said: “In all these processes, you are a cog in a big machine. Often, you could be a slightly bigger cog. Sometimes I'm a very small cog, but I've always wanted to make something which is entirely mine.”
Over five days of filming in the two mills, Andrew Elliot in the Scottish Borders and Glenlyon Tweed Mill in Highland Perthshire, McCulloch-Nowlan, along with his small team, set out to capture the art of weaving and the people behind the machines.
“When I first met Rob, who has dedicated his life to mastering these machines, I was struck by the quiet urgency of the moment,” McCulloch-Nowlan said.
“As apprentices become rarer and the older generation approaches retirement, an unbroken chain of skill stretching back centuries feels increasingly fragile.
“This film draws on everything I have learned in broadcast, patience, access and trust.”
He added: “At its heart, The Weavers is about more than a mill.
“It is about preservation of skill, memory and cultural identity, in Scotland and beyond.”
It wasn’t just the workers he interviewed that McCulloch-Nowlan had great admiration for, as he spoke fondly of the mills themselves and how he was left in awe when he set foot in them, with how much history and charm they possessed.
“As soon as I got there, my first reaction was like a Hollywood set designer would spend millions trying to recreate something like this, and it would look 10% as beautiful,” he said.
“It was literally all the history; it's sort of dust everywhere, it's a bit higgledy piggledy, but the building itself tells you so much.
“From a director's point of view, the lighting in here is amazing. The sounds are amazing.
“So as soon as I stepped in, it sounds really cliche, but I realised, the mill itself is a character.”
McCulloch-Nowlan said that he purposely didn’t want to use any drone or exterior shots of the mills as he wanted to focus on the space and the people inside the mill.
“I was really sort of drawn to how beautiful it is,” he said.
Once, Scotland's textile industry employed nearly 75% of the population. Today, that figure stands at just 0.2%.
McCulloch-Nowlan explained that against the backdrop of the industry’s decline, the stories of the two mills paint a portrait of an industry at a crossroads.
He added that he wanted to honour the craft of the workers while also prompting reflection from the audience on our traditions and heritage that we risk losing if we fail to protect them.
“When we think about tartan, tweed, or any sort of textile, you don't think about the places, you don't think about the people who are making them,” McCulloch-Nowlan said.
“You think about the end product, but without thinking about the people that are making them and the places that are making them, these things could be lost.
“I don't know about you, but I don't want these things to be made by machines. I think it should be made by people, and there should be people very much involved in those processes.”
The Weavers was praised when it featured at this year's Edinburgh Film Festival and has since been chosen to be played at the Shorts Mexico 2026 International Competition this week and the HB Film Festival in Paisley next month.
Since its debut earlier this year, McCulloch-Nowlan said that he has been inundated with people who work in the textile industry from across the world who want to show his film.
He has had people from weaving organisations in Canada, the Netherlands and the USA all reach out to him to praise him on his work.
“The main thing for me was I want someone to watch this film and to know a bit more about the process,” McCulloch-Nowlan added.
“I don't want them to come away thinking like it's a school lesson. But just having a bit more of a thought about the places that these things are made.”
