Being in a Place is not a conventional biographical portrait of the late Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait (1918 – 1999). Rather it proposes a dialogue between one filmmaker with another filmmaker’s practice. Fowler engages with Tait’s paper and sound archive but most importantly with her native Orkney, where she lived and filmed for most of her life, using the landscape and materials of Tait’s films in order to make his own. Employing Tait’s unrealised project Heartlandscape as a ‘score,’ Fowler’s film is structured in chapters that respond to the evocative titles in Tait’s unfinished script: Garden Pieces, Visions of Ephemerality, Several Portraits… The proposal, written for Channel 4 in 1983, was never completed. The film also draws upon newly recovered and restored film material that was discovered in the garden shed of the house Tait shared with her husband Alex Pirie. Being in a Place draws attention to Tait’s unrealised film projects, to a ‘fugitive archive’ of rushes, sound tapes and unmade films which cannot find its home in traditional collections but continues to be preserved under the custodianship of Tait scholar Prof. Sarah Neely, the film’s co-producer. It also draws attention to the difficulties of the independent filmmaker, then and now.