What do you believe in? No, really, tell me, I want to know. I'll listen, patiently, for as long as you want to talk. If you could name someone, I'll talk to them next and ask them the same question.
This, briefly, is the structure of the one-to-one conversations that make up Anti-Prophet, an 85-minute documentary film made by Glasgow-based artist Sarah Tripp. Shown in a suitably church-like space - all high ceilings and just a few rows of chairs - the film explores millennial spirituality in all its guises.
That was never quite the intention: Tripp never specified that belief should be equated with religion, but everyone does so. Instead of political or ethical beliefs, we encounter all shades of spiritual living, from a group of Carmelite nuns to the most laid-back Buddhist, via plenty of lapsed Catholics.
Though the film is a genuinely interesting record of our moment in time, with nods to self-help gobbledegook ("You can find jewels in that pond", says one woman) and the self-obsession it points to ("I just believe in me," says another), it is most engrossing as a close-up on the interview process, the interaction between this arbitrary chain of strangers. How people hold themselves; their mannerisms, relative ease and lack of it as they struggle to answer that dastardly question - at once a banal cliche and a profound issue for all of us - is the revelation here.
One woman is interviewed at the bottom of her stairs, underlining the sense of a spiritual journey so many of the interviewees talk about. Some people are almost unstoppable, turning the interview into a counselling session; others are reticent, all tangled up with the weight of the question.
There is plenty of humour too. Tripp's facial expressions throughout - sometimes bright and engaged, other times drained - are quite something, as is the man who brings an unlikely statistic (that by 28, we have each produced 30,000 tonnes of shit) into the conversation. We, like Tripp, don't know whether to believe him. And then there are the glorious bespectacled nuns. They sit stunned when asked what they believe in. Eventually, one blushes and says: "Well, I suppose God would be the obvious answer. But then, what does God mean?"
There are, in fact, no answers in this stylish and assured film. Tripp resists sharing her own beliefs with us, be cause she is in the role of Anti-Prophet, all vague questions and no hope of resolution. It might be a long way from anything approaching conventional religious belief, but faith-in-flux certainly looks good on this long spiritual trip.
Till January 29. Details: 0141-332 7521.
