I've Been Trying to Tell You - Film screening

Alasdair McLellan’s I’ve Been Trying to Tell You, made to accompany the Saint Etienne album of the same name, is an immersive, sun drenched nostalgia trip through 1990s Britain. Whether you look back on those years as a lost golden age, or a period of naivety, delusion and folly, I’ve Been Trying to Tell You evokes the era through a fog of memory. Join Saint Etienne band member, Bob Stanley for a screening of the movie following by a Q&A with Belfast Book Festival Patron Glenn Patterson . 

The film is an evocative look back on the optimism of the 1997-2001 era, a period that was topped and tailed by Labour's election victory and the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The film asks was the optimism of that era a lost golden age, or was it a period of naïvety, delusion and folly? Shot in locations from Grangemouth to Portmeirion to Southampton, I've Been Trying To Tell You is both beautiful, hypnotic and all-enveloping.

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Bob Stanley is a writer, musician, DJ and film producer. Since founding influential pop group Saint Etienne, Bob has enjoyed a parallel career as a music journalist, contributing to publications such as The Times, Smash Hits, NME, the Guardian and the Face. A former artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre, his films have been shown at the BFI, ICA and Royal Festival Hall, and he has curated several seasons for the Barbican. He is the author of Yeah Yeah Yeah, which was the Sunday Times Pop Music Book of the Year and a Rough Trade Book of the Year. His most recent book was the critically acclaimed Excavate: The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, co-edited with Tessa Norton.

Glenn Patterson is the author of ten novels, most recently Where Are We Now. He has written plays for Radio 3 and Radio 4 and is the co-writer of Good Vibrations, an award-winning movie based on the life of Belfast punk impresario Terri Hooley. A collection of his journalism, for among others The Guardian, Sunday Times and Irish Times, was published in 2006 as Lapsed Protestant and in 2008 he published the memoir Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times. He is a Patron of the Belfast Book Festival.