Bel (2026)

Every so often a documentary comes along that feels less like a film and more like an act of love, and Bel is one of those. Louise Lockwood's portrait of the Scottish-Kenyan musician Beldina Odenyo, who performed and recorded as Heir of the Cursed, is a tender, aching, quietly furious piece of work, and it moved me more than almost anything I have seen this year. It is a film about a life cut short, but it is even more a film about what that life left behind, and about a sister determined that the world should hear it.

Lockwood builds the picture from the most intimate materials imaginable. There is archival footage, childhood home videos and photographs, unheard demos, and interviews with the people who loved Beldina and lost her. The effect is to let her exist on screen as a whole person rather than a symbol, funny and searching and gifted, so that by the time the film reaches its hardest passages you feel the loss as something personal. This is not a documentary that observes its subject from a distance. It sits close, and it lets you grieve with the people on screen.

At the heart of it is a story of displacement. Beldina was brought from Kenya to Scotland as a young girl by her father, and grew up as part of the only Black family in a rural village. That sense of longing, for home, for family, for a place that feels like your own, runs through the whole film like a low note held under everything else. You feel it in her music and you feel it in the way she talks about belonging, and Lockwood is wise enough to let it sit there unresolved, because for Beldina it never quite was.

Ultimately it is her music that carries the film, as it should be. Heir of the Cursed's songs are woven all the way through, and they are extraordinary, full of the ache and the hope that defined her. The film also reaches into the wider world she moved in, including a moment when she was asked to compose music for a play about a Sierra Leonean man who died in police custody, a strand that opens the film out onto race, grief and injustice in Scotland without ever losing sight of the woman at its centre. Her art, the film argues, was never separate from her sense of the world.

The cinematography is genuinely beautiful, and never more so than when the film travels to her hometown in Kenya. There is a sequence built around her very first vinyl album, the one her surviving sister produced and pressed after her death, and the images there have a hushed, luminous quality that had me holding my breath. It is film-making that understands the difference between sentiment and feeling, and it always reaches for the latter.

That sister is the film's beating heart, carrying the weight of this act of remembrance all the way through, and the final passages are almost unbearably moving. Without giving too much away, the closing image of Beldina's record being played at her graveside is one of the most quietly devastating things I have seen on screen in a long time. There is a moment, too, in a recording studio, where a producer isolates a single guitar track and the sister listens, and says, "In a parallel universe she's playing that piece, and we're listening to it now." I have not been able to shake it since.

Four stars. Bel is a heartbreaking, beautiful, deeply humane film about home, family, music and the long work of grief, and it is a fitting monument to an artist who deserved far more time. It made me want to seek out every note Beldina Odenyo ever recorded, which is, in the end, exactly what a film like this should do. Go and let it break your heart, and then go and listen.

Bel is in Scottish cinemas now on a rolling release. Reviewed from a screener provided by the film's press team. If you have been affected by any of the themes in this film, the Samaritans can be reached free, day or night, on 116 123.

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