Chris Leslie’s Lights Out is a somber and meditative short film that anchors itself in the final years of the Whitevale and Bluevale tower blocks in Glasgow. Over a span of four years, Leslie composes a visual archive through timelapse sequences, architectural framing, and recorded interviews with both the earliest and last inhabitants of the flats. The film situates these giants, once heralded as bold “mansions in the sky,” in their twilight: darkened corridors, vacant rooms, and a skyline that holds echoes of former lives.
But Lights Out is not just a documentation of decay — it’s a site of memory and dislocation. Leslie gives voice to former residents like “Billy” and “Marion,” who recount childhood brightness alongside later despair, and to “Brian,” stranded on a 19th‑floor apartment as neighbors all moved away. Their testimonies are layered over visuals of the blocks’ looming forms, now stripped of community, as well as the slow dismantling of the towers via a painstaking top‑down demolition. In doing so, the film raises questions of who claims the city, what gets erased in “regeneration,” and what it means to lose a “home” that once held so much promise.
