If you were lucky enough to have seen cult Scottish group the Beta Band in their early days, you may remember the films that used to play on the walls of whichever small venue they were gracing at the time – madcap 16 mm movies featuring the band themselves in an outlandish array of costumes.
No matter if you don’t. I do, which is why it was less of a surprise to me when Beta Band mainstay John Maclean made a post-music career pivot into film direction. A certain young Irish actor named Michael Fassbender was an early fan and appeared in Maclean’s 2009 short Man On A Motorcycle, as well as its follow-up, Pitch Black Heist. That film also starred Liam Cunningham and won Maclean a BAFTA in 2012.
His feature debut, Slow West, arrived in 2015 and was an ahead-of-the-game Revisionist Western. It starred Fassbender again, alongside the great Ben Mendelsohn and a then 19-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee. I wonder what happened to him. Oh yeah, a Golden Globe win and an Oscar nomination for The Power Of The Dog six years later.
Read more:
Herald Arts | An t-Eilean/The Island: Do broadcasters have the guts for a Tartan Noir revolution?
It has been a decade since the release of Slow West so it’s fantastic news that not only is Maclean back in the saddle, as it were, but the world premiere of his new film is to open the increasingly muscular Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) next month ahead of its UK-wide release in May.
Titled Tornado, it follows the titular heroine and her father, Fujin, two Japanese puppeteers plying their trade in Britain in the 1790s. Trouble follows when they cross swords with local brigand Sugarman, though Tornado’s blade being of the samurai variety who can probably guess who comes out on top. Tim Roth and Jack Lowden are the bad guys, while Japanese model and singer Kōki is Tornado. Giri/Haji star Takehiro Hira is Fujin.
The full GFF line-up has just been announced and among the other highlights are two great-looking music documentaries about queer icon Peaches and Detroit techno legend Carl Craig; a take on Homer’s Odyssey which reunites Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche nearly 30 years after The English Patient; and Harvest, an adaptation of Jim Crace’s Booker shortlisted 2013 novel of the same name.
Loosely described as a Middle Ages-set folk horror, it was shot entirely in Scotland, stars Caleb Landry Jones and is the first English language film from Greek film-maker Athina Rachel Tsangari. Watch out for her: she cut her teeth working with Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos and in her previous works Attenberg and Chevalier you’ll find two of the most memorable and idiosyncratic films of this century. Or any other, probably.
Ill winds
I’m sure Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival is well used to the business of sorting out visa snags for performers. And music being what it is – a repository of social memories, a marker of cultural self-respect, sometimes even a naked act of political protest – there’s generally no shortage of musicians from troubled countries and disputed territories where those things have deep significance.
But politics doesn’t tend to intrude in quite the way it has this year, with the UK Government’s refusal to grant visas to Palestinian artists due to take part in a Celtic Connections event on Saturday.
Read more:
Herald Arts | Wait, where was my flashy new Agatha Christie adaptation over Christmas?
The show is Bethlehem Calling. It’s a multi-disciplinary production based on the diaries of 12-year-old Palestinian schoolgirls, and as well as its Palestinian performers and director (actor and playwright Raeda Ghazaleh), it is a collaboration between (among others) Grid Iron director Ben Harrison, former Franz Ferdinand drummer Paul Thomson and a slew of Glasgow-based musicians.
A post on the Bethlehem Calling Instagram page is worth reading in full: “We learned this week that three of our Palestinian performers have had their UK visa applications rejected. We urge the Home Office to reconsider. This is a high profile and hugely positive cultural exchange supported by Creative Scotland and Celtic Connections, bringing together a diverse group of theatre-makers and musicians from Palestine and Scotland at a time when it feels more important than ever to support Palestinian artists and amplify their voices and stories. While the show will very much go on as planned, we are disappointed that an ambitious and timely collaboration between Palestinian and Scottish artists has been impacted by decisions that seem frustratingly harsh.”
Of reply from the UK Government’s Home Office there has come none so far. You can read more on the story in Paul English’s exclusive report for The Herald.
And finally
Kinky footwear and their equivalent in the world of lingerie are much on the mind of Herald theatre writers Brian Beacom and Neil Cooper this week as they take the measure of an upcoming musical adaptation of hit 2005 film Kinky Boots, and a touring production of camp classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It began life as a stage production before being committed to celluloid oh-so-many years ago now. Let’s do the time-warp indeed.
Sign up for Herald Arts and get weekly info and insight into arts and culture from Scotland and beyond.
Hailing “a two-hour long proclamation for diversity” (don’t tell Donald Trump, he’ll try to close it down with an executive order), Brian spoke to Kinky Boots lead Johannes Radebe ahead of the show’s arrival at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow next month. If you know the name, Radebe is a Strictly Come Dancing regular.
Meanwhile Neil was at the Playhouse in Edinburgh to see Jason Donovan take on the role made famous by Tim Curry on both stage and screen – that of Frank-N-Furter. In a four star review he hails “a campy celebration of oddball otherness”.