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THE KEEPER

By Alexandra GENOVA

Documentary - Completed 2023

A laird in Scotland, who presides over a palace and 4500-acre estate, is attempting to redress the imbalance of land ownership in Britain by handing it over to the community. This film follows his journey as he grapples with his own egalitarian ideals and the inevitable friction that comes with huge

- Year of production
- 2023
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- UNITED KINGDOM
- Languages
- ENGLISH
- Duration
- 25 mn
- Director(s)
- Alexandra GENOVA
- Producer(s)
- Taryn KALISH, Joshua DAVIE
- Synopsis
- Ninian Crichton Stuart is the Hereditary Keeper of Falkland Palace and Estate in Fife, east Scotland. Inheriting this 4500 acre estate is a privilege that has never sat easily with him and he left the family seat aged 19, spending many years as a community worker living and working with the homeless and vulnerable in Glasgow.
  
  Living in these two opposing worlds made him question the fairness of his entitlement. What if the people were the landowners? Having run the estate for more than 40 years, Ninian now has a radical vision. Rather than pass on ownership to his children—and continue the inheritance line of 135 years—he wants to offer the opportunity of ownership to the community; extending beyond a family tree into a forest.
  
  This progressive proposal sits within a wider context of land inequality in Scotland, a country that has some of the most concentrated patterns of land ownership in the world. Indeed while community buy outs are possible in Scotland and are beginning to gain traction, a top-down community buy-in like Ninian is proposing is unheard of in central Scotland.
  
  ‘The Keeper’ follows Ninian’s journey with letting go and offers an unexpected viewpoint of class and privilege in Britain. It explores the potential of land to be both a site of trauma and of healing, and reveals how the intention to ‘do good’ is rarely a straightforward endeavour.