Fergus

Beautiful outcast Mari braves the bigotry of her industrial hometown to be with her estranged six-year-old son, Fergus. Avoiding a posse of local women on the street, she and Fergus take refuge in a second hand clothes shop where she straps an oversized kilt around his loins. "You'll look like a prince, Fergie, as you always should", she whispers.

Rejected by her father and ostracised by the community, she takes her own life, leaving Fergus a mysterious photograph of a handsome kilted aristocrat. Like a hero of Greek tragedy, Fergus is bound by the fates to wear the gift-curse of the kilt for the rest of his life, which he devotes, impossibly, to becoming the aristocrat in the photograph; his mother's dead lover.

He is offered a form of protection by his two 'guardians' (Smout and Meg) whimsically appointed by his mother, but his rejection of one, and his collusion in the death of the other expose him to the furies of his own falsely conceived identity. Recognition as a war hero and minor poet catapults him into a punishing and humiliating marriage to the celebrated and sexually voracious romantic novelist Betty T Shields who suffers, appropriately, from similar identity/class confusion. He finds redemption of sorts on the wild and remote island of his grandfather's birth (His grandfather having caused all the trouble in the first place by his pious intolerance of Mari).

Redemption comes through the simple love of the giantess Kirstie, and her dying gift to him of her ancient church harmonium.

The story of the harmonium is an important framing device in the film, since we will be entertained, intrigued and amused throughout by short extracts (courtesy of the amazing Ivor Cutler) from a concert of the Ancient Fergus, playing and performing his post-redemptive works accompanied by the asthmatic instrument. It should be magical and uplifting therefore when the young Fergus first sees the harmonium and we instantly understand that he has found his 'voice' with which he can express the confounding contradictions of his life and loves.