Southern Journey (Revisited)
He may have acted in Game Of Thrones and Bohemian Rhapsody, but over the past decade Brit Tim Plester has had a thriving career as a docmaker, starting with a film about Morris dancing selected for SXSW, and now Southern Journey (Revisited), which recreates ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s famous 1959 road trip through the Deep South.
British actor-director Tim Plester features in a new Icelandic drama Backyard Village, directed by Marteinn Thorsson and starring opposite Laufey Elíasdóttir as a middle-aged Englishman trying to come to terms with a tragedy in his life. “It was a chance to do a small indie film with integrity and heart with somebody that I had great respect for – and, on top of that, I got 10 days free holiday in Iceland,” Plester reflects on what he describes as a dream job.
The film, which premieres at the Santa Barbara IFF, marks yet another credit in Plester’s ever expanding filmography. However, Plester’s work in front of the camera is only part of the story. Over the last decade, since making the Morris dancing film The Way Of The Morris (2011) together with filmmaking partner Rob Curry, Plester has had a blossoming second career as a documentary director.
The Morris dancing doc was a very personal project for Plester. He had grown up in the Oxfordshire village of Adderbury, which had a proud Morris dancing tradition.
“My uncle was still a member of the Morris team. He said the team were going to go to France and visit the graves of the Morris men who didn’t come back from the First World War,” Plester remembers. The uncle was looking for someone to record the journey. He and Curry took on the task, little realising that they would end up making a feature doc.
Plester discovered the reason that the Morris tradition in the village had died out after the war was because so many of the dancers had died. It was only revived in the 1970s.
“They were all killed apart from one of them…this massive penny just dropped,” Plester says of how he realised the importance of the Morris dancing to the community. He began to take it seriously. Like many other folk rituals in the UK, it has often been the subject of scorn and cheap humour (“Morris dancing is the punchline to a joke which nobody can remember the set-up for”) but he could now understand its roots.
He “reassessed it, re-embraced it” and took pride in the tradition. “I like to confront people with my Morris dancing now. I come from a village in Oxfordshire and we dance around with flowers in our hats. I like to challenge people with that.”
The film ended up being programmed at SXSW, in Texas, “the coolest film festival on the planet.” Its success kickstarted his documentary making career.
Curry and Plester generally self-distribute their films, thereby retaining creative control of their work.
It may not be immediately obvious to outsiders but there is “connective tissue” between the docs that followed. When Morris dancing was revived in Adderbury in 1975, a special concert was held in the village to mark the occasion. “The band that played that night was the Etchingham Steam Band and in that band was a young folk singer called Shirley Collins,” Plester remembers.
The legendary Collins was to be the subject of their subsequent documentary, The Ballad Of Shirley Collins (2017), which followed the singer, now 80, as she recorded her first album in over 35 years. She had also appeared on stage alongside her then husband Ashley Hutchings (of Fairport Convention), in the National Theatre’s production of ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’. Plester had seen the show as a kid. “I went to see that show with my dad and it’s what I cite as what made me want to be an actor. It just blew my little mind.”
Southern Journey (Revisited), the most recent doc made by Plester and Curry, premiered at the Sheffield Doc Fest. It is due to screen in the UK on Sky Arts later this year. In the film, the two directors recreate ethnomusicologist and song-collector Alan Lomax’s famous 1959 road trip through the Deep South. Wherever he stopped, Lomax explored (and often recorded and preserved) the local music. Who accompanied Lomax on this journey? None other than Shirley Collins.
Plester and Curry made Southern Journey (Revisited) when they were in the US, promoting The Ballad Of Shirley Collins. It was shot “completely on the fly…as simple as why not take a cameraman and camera with us. We were going that way anyway. Let’s see what we find.” That is how, in 2018, the British filmmakers found themselves listening to blues and hillbilly music in Kentucky and Mississippi and meeting descendants of the families that Lomax had visited almost 60 years before.
“Because we were going there to talk to people about music, it allowed them maybe to open their doors and talk about other things,” Plester says of how his subjects reflect on politics, race and southern identity.
The roll-out of Southern Journey (Revisited) was affected by the pandemic but it has nevertheless been seen in cinemas, and will screen in the UK on Sky Arts later in 2021. Now, Curry and Plester are looking ahead at their next projects.
The duo are currently developing a number of new feature docs dealing with green issues and social activism.
Among these is a film inspired by Nick Hayes’ ‘The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us’, his study of ownership and privilege in the English countryside. It asks why so much land is in private hands and therefore out of bounds to the public. Curry and Plester have already made a teaser and are keen to shoot soon to tie in with ongoing debates about the law of trespass.
Another passion project is The Trial Of Grey Owl, about the pioneering environmentalist and nature writer whose story was told in a feature film by Richard Attenborough. He claimed that he was a Native American when, in fact, he was a British-born immigrant to Canada whose real name was Archibald Belaney. The doc will explore how Grey Owl’s legacy is affected by the lies he told about his upbringing. Grey Owl was actually from Hastings…by coincidence the town where Shirley Collins was born. “There is even connective tissue there,” Plester says of how the project relates to his previous work.
A third doc project Plester and Curry are hoping to make is Irreplaceable, inspired by Julian Hoffman’s book about how precious eco-systems and habitats all over the world are being destroyed by human intervention.
“What is interesting about all these films is that they are very much to do with green issues. That is where we are trying to position our work now,” the actor-director declares.
The acting, Plester explains, “pays the bills.” He’ll be seen on UK screens shortly in new series of Britannia and Worzel Gummidge. If he is offered a job in front of camera, he will generally always take it and he has a feature project in development which he will direct. However, documentary remains a consuming passion. He and Curry don’t just shoot their films together. They also edit them. “We’ve found a way to work well together over the year. Neither of us are too precious about what we do,” Plester says of his fruitful and long-standing partnership with Curry.
