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Cove Park and little wonders

Writer's picture: Csilla  ToldyCsilla Toldy

In 2023, I was awarded a funded residency in Cove Park, Scotland. This is an artist residency retreat where artists of all disciplines can mingle for shorter or longer periods. You can exchange ideas, cross-fertilise, and work living in a pod or studio, whatever you need.

I could not go last summer due to illness, but the organisers found another slot in late November when I could stay for three weeks. Cove Park is an hour's drive from Glasgow along Lough Long. It is stretched over fields and hills and I chose, as my accommodation a pod with a view. A room with a view is my ideal place to work in, I decided. When my eyes get tired of looking at a screen, I can rest them on the landscape. Let them travel and enjoy the ever-changing beauty of nature. This might sound romantic, but since living in Ireland I learnt to appreciate this unreliable tendency of the elements and value their effect on body and mind. And indeed, on the shores of Lough Long it could happen, too, that you admired a brilliant sunrise over the hills first thing in the day, and danced in a snowstorm in the afternoon.



So, the illness in the summer turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for several synchronicities started to happen:

1.. I was nominated for an award from the European Film Union with my film To My Dear Idealist. (listed under Films on my Website). Earlier in the year, the film was also short-listed for the Drumshambo Poetry Film Festival and screened at the event. As I was unable to go to Cove Park in August, I could go to Drumshanbo, this wonderful village in Ireland. Consequently, I connected with Colm Scully another film poet and the organiser of poetry film festivals.


Drumshanbo Written Word Festival with Colm Scully
Drumshanbo Written Word Festival with Colm Scully

This film is based on Matilda Olkinaite's poem, who was Litvak, a Jewish prodigy poet, killed by Nazis. I was made aware of her poetry by Eglė Kačkutė

who put me in touch with Laima Vince, the poet and translator, who translated Matilda's work into English and wrote an essay about her life and work. The film is bi-lingual, including the original Lithuanian and the translation voiced by Egle.



2..The gala of the European Film Union took place on 1st December in Glasgow, so, I could go. But even more miraculously, Laima Vince was spending five days at Cove Park, too, so we could connect and spend a day together at the Cove and Kilcreggan Book Festival. The jewel in the crown became the night at the gala, where I won Best Cinematography Award and a statuette that is now sitting on the mantlepiece.


Considering that I shot this film on my iPhone in our local forest, without any financial support from my own money is something to remember. Not as a complaint, but rather as a reminder that if you are passionate about an idea you should realise it no matter. It is also remarkable that I worked with a composer for the first time on this film. This meant that Derek Ball Scottish composer created the sound for the footage after editing, giving me the exact minutes and seconds where to add the sound file. The haunting music in the footage tells the tragic story of this beautiful soul, Matilda.


Staying in Cove was wholesome and healing. I finalised a poetry collection, soon to be published by Arlen House, edited work I had composed over last year at home and in Paris in the Autumn and started work on a new film poem. (more of it later)








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