Tag: songs

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Sound Of Nomad:
Koryo Arirang

Director – Kim So-young (as Kim Jeong) – 2017 – South Korea – 87m

****

How an indigenous theatre company kept the culture of the Koryo people alive after they were deported by the Soviet authorities from Far East Russia to Kazakhstan in 1937 – in the documentary season: Korean Film Nights: In Transit presented by LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival

The Beijing Treaty (of 1860 although the date isn’t mentioned) ceded to Russia the so-called Maritime Province – an area of land stretching down to Vladivostock. The territory bordered on the Northwestern tip of Choson (Joseon), today’s Korea, and Chosons stated migrating into the Maritime Province, calling themselves the Koryo people. In late 1937, the Soviet authorities decided that the Koryos could potentially be Japanese spies and deported them in boarded up trains to Ushtobei, Kazakhstan, Central Asia.

The journey took two days and many children died, their corpses thrown unceremoniously out of the train at night. After the journey, the deportees faced a harsh winter, the eventual death toll rising to 40 000.

This story has been documented in Korea, but little else about the Koryos has. The first Kazakhstan Koryo settlement in Ushtobei is today marked by a memorial.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Movies Music

Poly Styrene:
I Am A Cliché

Punk biopic

Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché
Directed by Celeste Bell and Paul Sng
Certificate 12a, 96 minutes
Released 5 March at www.modernfilms.com
Viewers can select a participating local cinema to share the revenue of the virtual box office

This documentary about the late Poly Styrene (real name Marion Elliot), the iconic front woman of the 1970s punk band X-Ray Spex, paints a compelling picture of a creative and innovative young woman going against the grain to break new ground in pop music. The band was very much her baby which she put together by advertising for musicians in the music press. She wrote all their material.

Her literal baby is the film’s co-director and co-writer Celeste Bell, who as a young child escaped from her well-intentioned but unfit mother during their time living on the Hare Krishna estate in Hertfordshire. On her mum’s death, Celeste found herself the guardian of Poly’s vast archive. It was five years before she could bring herself to look inside and see what was there… Read more

Full review in Reform magazine.

Trailer:

Categories
Music

Raf And O
as
The Kick Inside
play
the songs
of Kate Bush

Bar & Co, Temple Pier, Embankment, opposite Temple tube between Blackfriars and Waterloo Bridges, London.

2018.02.25

*****

This article was originally written as a post on Facebook 2018.02.26.

Raf And O’s debut appearance as The Kick Inside to play the songs of Kate Bush, now relaunched as online gigs, 12.00, 20.00 hrs on Saturdays from September 26th. Booking info here.

This was an amazing evening in which Raf Mantelli and O Richard Smith (aka Raf And O) performed the songs of Kate Bush under the moniker The Kick Inside launch: The Kick Inside play the songs of Kate Bush.

I can’t honestly say I really got Kate Bush back in the day when EMI first pumped lots of money into her career: I remember enjoying the Hounds Of Love album (her fifth) when it came out but I only really clicked some years later when I was given an unexpected copy of Aerial for Christmas (thanks again Sue), a fantastic (double) album.

That’s a long time after the songs represented here which covered, I think, the first five albums. The early stuff. (If there was anything later than Hounds Of Love, someone can correct me.)

Anyway, the gig itself: the venue was London’s Bar & Co.,… Read the rest