Oscar winning actress Tilda Swinton at the Scottish film festival in Beijing March 23. [John Sexton]

Oscar winning actress Tilda Swinton was the very model daughter of a modern major general as she greeted fans to the finale of a three day Scottish Film festival at the China Film Archive in Beijing last night.

But once inside the theatre she danced and twirled like a teenager with a man in a kilt and Doctor Marten's boots – co-host and former Edinburgh International Film Festival director Mark Cousins.

A young woman piped the audience in with "a Scottish Soldier" and afterwards sang in Gaelic. Then, as the audience sat on bean-bags and watched a three-screen back-projection of a winter landscape seen from a train, Swinton and her daughters blew snowflakes (feathers) in the air.

Young filmmaker Jamie Stone introduced his charming three minute cartoon "Space Travel according to John," which was animated using soap powder and narrated by a ten year old boy.

The main feature Lynne Ramsay's "Ratcatcher" (1999) was a difficult choice for a Chinese audience. A portrayal of the 1970s Scottish working class, it brings to mind Ken Loach, but was shot without sympathy, its characters portrayed without dignity. The desperate community's wounds are all apparently self-inflicted; a refuse workers' strike, muggings, drunkenness, casual violence and sexual abuse. But the sets and costumes were a loving recreation of the time, with an Atlantean double decker bus the star of the show for me.

The three-day Scottish Cinema of Dreams festival showed such classics as "Culloden" (1964) and "I Know Where I'm Going" (1945). During their stay in China, Swinton and Cousins were able to plug Scotland's film industry to several hundred million viewers of Chinese national TV.

(China.org.cn by John Sexton, March 24, 2009)