Barefoot and dressed in a stunning metallic dress, Beldina Odenyo walked onto a stage at the Scottish Album of the Year Award in the autumn of 2021 and the room went still. Critics reached for Nina Simone and PJ Harvey, but neither captured it. Performing under the name Heir Of The Cursed, she cast a mesmerizing spell on the crowd: a voice that seemed to come from somewhere older than the song, older than the room, somewhere primal in the universe. Weeks later, she was gone. For many in the room, hearing her for the first time, it was a night they would never forget.
Her last will and testament left one instruction: “Don’t read them unless you’re prepared for what lies within.” Her sister, Leah McAleer, a practicing family doctor with no music-industry experience read them anyway. She opened the notebooks, songbooks, and journals, watched Bel’s video diaries for the first time, and plugged in a hard drive that included a secret folder of music demos. Then she made a promise. She would share Bel’s music, and Bel’s life, with the world.
Award-winning filmmaker Louise Lockwood’s BEL follows Leah’s discovery and promise across three years, and it unfolds like a mysterious seance, and despite the darkness it moves through, it is luminous. As Leah and Bel’s friends listen to one track after another, Bel returns, speaking in her own voice: “If anything ever happens to me, it’d be good if somebody found this, and understood what I was feeling.” From an interrupted childhood in Kisumu, Kenya to a Scottish former mining village where she was the only Black child in her school, to the open-mic nights of Glasgow, Bel tells her own emotionally-charged story. Alone in her home studio, she turned that grief, isolation, and her two homelands into songs that are more than the sum of their parts. Music so strange, singular, heartbreaking, and joyful, it feels like a kind of sonic sorcery, with a voice you didn’t know you were waiting for, and within seconds, you’ll never forget it.
“Watch it. Then go and listen to her phenomenal music.” – The Guardian
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