A cinema verité film documenting some of the lesser known faces instrumental in the rise of the British counterculture is coming to Stroud Film Festival this March.
Mo, directed for the BBC by playwright and filmmaker John McGrath, casts a beatific eye on a day in the life of folk singer Mo Kennedy Martin, as poets, musicians and more gather at her flat to talk and perform. It features musicians Bert Jansch, John Renbourn of Pentangle and Davey Graham as well as poets Adrian Mitchell and Michael and Frances Horovitz. Also appearing are film writers and activists Troy Kennedy Martin (The Italian Job) and Ken Wlaschin.
The film will be introduced by Stroud poet Adam Horovitz, whose parents feature in the film. He says: “Mo captures an almost forgotten moment in time, post-Beat but pre-Hippy, just before the counterculture exploded out of the underground and into the mainstream. It’s a little look behind the scenes of the movement that filled the Albert Hall with poetry in 1965, captured in Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion.
“The aim, in showing it now, is to use the film to help restart a conversation on how music, art, poetry and film worked together to transform the British cultural scene, and to raise awareness, in a time of polarisation and ghettoization of art forms, of how intermingled and enlivening the cross-pollination of the arts used to (and can still) be.
“But just as importantly, it is a beautiful portrait of a time, showing in the year that would have seen both McGrath and my father’s 90th birthdays.”
Mo is showing at 2pm on Sunday March 9th at Stroud’s Museum in the Park. Tickets are £8 (pay it forward) / £6 (standard) / £4 (low income/cost of living affected). To book, and to find out more about the film festival: https://www.stroudfilmfestival.org/mofilm
