Sensational as Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back was, I may not be alone experiencing lagging attention as the 8-hour documentary (trimmed from 18 hours) was grinding on with frequent repetitions. No such problem occurs with Ajoy Bose and Peter Compton’s The Beatles and India, to be shown as the closing film on March 17 of the 2022 Mostly British Film Festival.
The festival is scheduled March 10–17, all in the Vogue Theater and nothing streamed — an old-fashioned “live attendance event,” COVID-19 permitting.
The Beatles and India is among the films about music and dance featured at the festival. It is Goldilocks-perfect in length and execution, with stunning archival footage, recordings, photographs, and eyewitness accounts along with location shoots across India, following the unique journey of John, Paul, George, and Ringo from their celebrity lives to a remote Himalayan ashram in search of spiritual bliss that inspired a burst of creative songwriting.
Opera is well represented with Falling for Figaro, on March 14, the story of a young American financial whiz, who passes up a promotion with a London firm to pursue her impossible dream of studying opera in the Scottish Highlands. Her teacher is an eccentric diva played with hilarious abandon by the co-star of the British comedy hit Absolutely Fabulous, Joanna Lumley. Competing in a national contest, the American novice finds herself up against a dashing fellow student. Romance blooms.
Leaving Las Vegas-director Mike Figgis shines a spotlight on the famed Rolling Stones guitarist in a revealing documentary portrait, Ronnie Wood: Somebody Up There Likes Me, on March 17. Still a photogenic interview subject at 72, with his cadaverously craggy features and perennially jet-black plume of crow-feather hair, Wood muses on his career with the Stones, his passion as a painter, and his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction. With archive footage and appearances by Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Rod Stewart, Damien Hirst, and more.
An improbable true story is the basis of Fisherman’s Friends, Chris Foggin’s film about a cynical London music executive, Rupert Christie (Daniel Mays), who has worked with U2 and Coldplay, on vacation in a remote Cornish village, where he’s pranked by his boss (Noel Clarke) into trying to sign a group of shanty-singing fishermen.
Spoiler! The group went on to play Glastonbury, serenaded the royal flotilla at the Queen’s 2012 Diamond Jubilee celebrations, sang for Charles and Camilla, and performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London. But as for the film’s gyrations, head to the Vogue to find out.
For all the festival programs, see the Mostly British website.
