“I saw two paths in front of me. One where I try and do something about it, and one where I don’t. And I didn’t really know where that path led. I could end up going down a darker path. So I decided to make the film as a way to force myself to do something about it, and open up to my family.”
In Silent Men, Cowles sets out to tackle his own lack of openness and talk to other men about the problems they have faced sharing problems, feelings and emotions with close family members. Along the way he attends a men’s workshop near Edinburgh – courtesy of his dashboard-mounted camera we see his shell-shocked reaction as he drives away from the three-day event – and interviews a clinical psychologist. It’s from her that he hears some of the harrowing statistics around men and mental health, facts which provide context to his own personal journey. How, for instance, suicide is the main cause of death for people under 40 and how around 75% of suicides are male.
Read more
Cowles filmed interviews with around 20 men, though most didn’t make the final cut. Three who did are John, Dom and Cowles’s friend Ainslie. John, whose marriage fell apart after he hid a cancer diagnosis, eventually attempted suicide, the darkest of all paths. Dom and Ainslie talk about their own struggles with feelings of inadequacy and depression.
In two of these exchanges, Cowles’s interviewees turn the tables and start asking him questions about his own feelings and perceived shortcomings. Did he expect that, and how did he feel about it?
“That’s kind of when the film started getting interesting,” he admits. “Dom started interrogating me, which wasn’t expected. I had a little GoPro camera set up to film the wider room but the sun was shining in from behind my head and you can barely see me. I think if I had anticipated that he was going to interrogate as much as he did, I would have filmed myself better at that point. I was still sort of hiding from the process at that stage. But that’s when it became more engaging and moved my story along. And then Ainslie did it as well.”
Cowles also talks to his elder brother and, crucially, to his parents. It will prove to be one of the film’s pivotal scenes.
A winner of BAFTA Scotland and Royal Television Society Scotland award for his short films, Cowles is possibly best known for the segments he produced for BBC Scotland’s hit football show A View From The Terrace. Engrossing, winningly odd and deeply idiosyncratic, they revealed a film-maker with a distinctive style which has seen him often compared to a mixture of Louis Theroux and veteran documentarian Nick Broomfield. Like Theroux, Cowles affects a slightly bumbling on-screen manner. Like the perpetually headphone wearing Broomfield, he can often be seen in his own films holding a microphone or fussing with a camera.
Seven years in the making, Silent Men will be released on November 19, International Men’s Day, but it has already proved a hit on the festival circuit. The day we speak, the Edinburgh-born film-maker has just returned from Cork and the following day he will be in Estonia, where the film is screening at the well-regarded Back Nights Film Festival in Tallinn.
And by the end of his film, as he faces his parents in the family home, is Cowles finally able to voice those all-important words? That would be telling. The film’s ultimate message, though, is one of positivity and hope, and it’s that which has struck audiences. “People do come out of the screenings really wanting to talk and discuss the issue,” says Cowles. “It has been quite moving for me seeing the positive impact it’s having on people.”
He has even saw the film’s effect in action with his own eyes. “Someone came up to me after a screening and told me that he was going to phone his dad and tell him he loved him because he’d never done it before and had struggled with it – and then he went and did, it right in front of me.”
Sometimes all it takes is a well-timed phone call to break into – or out of – the world of the silent men.
Silent Men is released on November 19
