GALASHIELS filmmakers Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian shone on London’s silver screen last weekend.

The cinematic couple’s latest short film, Orphine, was amongst the highlights of the Portobello Free Film Festival The 12-minute piece is a captivating story of loss hauntingly retold through a veil of lyrical poetry, gripping cantation and striking imagery.

Borrowing heavily on the epic Mesopotamian poem, The Hullupu Tree, Orphine swaps the banks of the Euphrates for bridges in and around Gala Policies.

But uses the narration - In the first days, in the very first days, In the first nights, in the very first nights, In the first years, in the very first years - to great effect.

Swan and Simian, who are better known for their musical collaboration The Bird and the Monkey, originally created the skeleton of Orphine as part of a video-art installation, commissioned for the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Hawick earlier this year.

It explored autobiographical experiences of motherhood, sexuality and near-death experiences.

And the finished film which grew from the April exhibition follows a similar path.

Orphine, exquisitely played by Swan, enters the underworld in search of death to bring back her unborn child.

The Pagan-esque narration and thought-provoking, almost disturbing, imagery is contrasted by a sweetly sentimental score to create magical results.

Bowing more to the likes of Paul Morrissey or Jean Cocteau than Scorsese and Speilberg, Orphine will have limited appeal.

But that shouldn’t detract from delights on offer in Gala’s very own Underworld.

Swan, who is a fine art graduate, told us: “ Orphine slips between borders, between the realms of the living and the dead, consciousness and the dream.

“Personal history is filtered through the lens of mythology, one woman becomes every woman.

“It draws on both the autobiographical and on mythology: particularly the classic myths of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern reinterpretations in the cinema of Ingmar Bergman and Jean Cocteau, the art of Louise Bourgeois and the Surrealists, the writing of James Joyce, the Symbolist Poets, the Beat writers and the Magical Realists.”