The Ballad of Shirley Collins

In a tale of treachery and tragedy straight out of a ballad, the English folk singer Shirley Collins dramatically lost her voice on stage in the late 70s. Her husband had just her left for another woman, who’d taken to showing up at Collins’s gigs – rubbing salt in the wounds by wearing the offending ex’s jumpers. Humiliated, Collins opened her mouth but nothing came out. “He undid me. I should have got angry, but I got heartbroken,” she explains in this portrait of the artist as an older and wiser woman. The Guardian
 

Our ‘long short’ (64mins) – Way of the Morris traces a route from the Oxfordshire village of Adderbury to the fields of the Somme and back. It begins with a folk poem about how a dancing fox formed the earth, recited over sunny shots of cheery villagers clutching their ales outside a country pub while jolly morris men dance around. It’s all very idyllic, and, with their rose-tinted hand-held camera, Plester and co-director Rob Curry present a vision of the morris that’s pretty familiar – quaint and a little embarrassing. But don’t let those first few moments fool you. Soon the turbulent history of these Adderbury morris dancers is revealed – how the young men who were part of the same group before the First World War, were all called up to fight and only one came back alive. Which meant the end of the Adderbury morris troupe for a while. The Telegraph