This article appears as part of the Herald Arts newsletter.

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.

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)........

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