At the turn of the 1930s the cinema enjoyed a real boom in Scotland, with the birth of production companies and institutions dedicated to the development of educational film, the value of which is quickly recognised. In 1935, the Scottish Educational Film Association (SEFA) was founded to promote the use of film as a pedagogical tool. With the cooperation of the Scottish Film Council (created in 1935), it published manuals on the use of film in classes, organised mobile cinema screenings in the countryside during the war, and founded an educational film production company.  The Joint Production Committee produced Kippers, which screened at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival in 1952.

Herring fishing has been a traditional Scottish activity ever since the Middle Ages. The production of kippers became little by little industrialised, retaining the traditional techniques of salting and smoking to preserve the fish. While the men set out to sea, the women worked at the factory, on tasks such as gutting the herring, in the ports of Aberdeen and Peterhead.

Herring fishing and its evolution were the subject of a major film of the British documentary movement: Drifters, directed by John Grierson (1898-1972), released in 1929. Influenced by the montage theories of Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), and poetic tonality of the films of Robert Flaherty (1884-1951), the Scottish filmmaker explores, in Drifters, the relationship between the everyday life of the fishermen, and its economic and industrial impact. John Grierson strongly believed in the educational value of the cinema and this film continues strongly in this tradition.

The original music for this film was composed by Fabien Cali in 2011 in the context of the call for proposals launched in partnership with the Sacem (Société des auteurs compositeurs et éditeurs de musique -' Society of authors, composers and music editors).