Nation's oldest flamenco company celebrates its 60th in SF

By James Ambroff-Tahan

Carola Zertuche, pictured above, has been Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco’s artistic director for 20 years. This year, it honors its 60th anniversary home season with a one-night only celebration.

Carola Zertuche has been Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco’s artistic director for 20 years and she wanted to do something special for its 60th anniversary home season.

So she curated “De Ayer a Hoy,” a one-night-only celebration which honors the company’s six decades of artistry, the legacy of founders Adela Clara and Miguel Santos, and looks toward its continuing evolution. The program of nine works — three world premieres and six reimagined pieces from its repertoire — will be presented Oct. 17 at the Herbst Theater.

“While I’ve been preparing the 60th anniversary home season I’ve watched videos from when they started, and they used to do a lot of classic Spanish dance, like boleros and jotas, and flamenco,” Zertuche said of the troupe, which is the oldest flamenco company in the nation and the second-oldest dance company in the Bay Area. “But since I became artistic director I’ve done more flamenco, and I want to see how we can move the traditional in a different way, not just the way they taught us.”

Zertuche, who started her dance career in Mexico City, has performed at numerous venues, toured the globe extensively and collaborated with other artistic companies via her choreography. Notable partnerships include her San Francisco Opera debut in 2017, as the choreographer for “La Traviata,” and her 2019 production with The Glide Ensemble of “Soul y Alma,” which was a tribute to gospel and flamenco. Both productions showcased her fondness for cross-genre artistry.

“I like incorporating different musicians and the piano, and I have invited contemporary dancers,” Zertuche said of her penchant for expressing the pillars of flamenco — cante, baile and toque (song, dance and musical accompaniment) — in creative ways.

“The cante is one of the main things in flamenco and super important for me, so I told Miguel Santos I need to bring singers from Spain.”

Santos (1925-2024) served as principal dancer and choreographer for the company since its inception and was its artistic director starting in 1987 until Zertuche assumed the post. His company cofounder, Clara (1932-2026), is widely recognized as a foundational figure in American flamenco, and under her stewardship Theatre Flamenco became the first resident dance company in the United States to stage full-scale productions of Spanish dance.

Amparo Heredia from Granada and José Cachito Díaz from Barcelona are among the notable Spanish singers who will perform in “De Ayer a Hoy,” which translates to "from yesterday to today." 

Dancer Adrian Santana, who is from Málaga, is another renowned Spanish artist on the program; he will reimagine Santos’ “Zapateado/Farruca” from 1989 and join Zertuche in a new duet honoring Santos.

San Francisco native Cristina Hall is among the luminaries who will perform one of the world premieres of the evening — an opus Zertuche commissioned. Hall first became interested in flamenco as a teenager in The City.

“I was drawn to the art form as a necessity to express myself, and I felt that flamenco was something that just came to me and I needed to do,” Hall recounted. “So I grabbed the Yellow Pages and found a teacher, Virginia Iglesias, and started taking classes with her for two years before I moved to Spain.”

Hall moved to Seville — the epicenter of flamenco, in Spain’s Andalucía region — when she was 18 and has lived there for 25 years. She recalled her initial immersion in Spanish culture as a revelatory experience.

“I didn’t speak any Spanish and didn’t know anyone there, and it was difficult back then because foreigners were not really accepted or allowed to dance anywhere; it took a lot of time for me to prove myself,” Hall said. “It changed my life because I’m still there, and I’m working professionally there as an artist, throughout Europe, the States and all over.”

Hall, who has choreographed numerous pieces and has her own company, noted that Americans relate to flamenco differently than Spaniards.

“Over there it’s part of their culture, and here it’s something exotic, and sometimes Americans have a clichéd way of thinking about it,” Hall said. “Over there, it’s an art form, not just an attraction or entertainment, and they take it very seriously.”

Theatre Flamenco guitarist Jesse Torre is another San Francisco native who will perform on Saturday. He studied at the prestigious Eastman School of Music in New York but developed an appreciation for flamenco through his studies with Bay Area guitarist and composer Jason “El Rubio” McGuire and his wife, Yaelisa, an Emmy Award-winning dancer and choreographer.

“They left a really good impression on me for my flamenco studies; she’s an incredible dancer and they both trained me quite a bit in the art of accompanying,” Torre said.

Torre said what he loves the most about flamenco is that it speaks of a history and legacy of the suffering, disenfranchisement and persecution of the Gitano, or Romani, people of southern Spain, which is evident in dancing, singing and guitar playing.

“Everything involved has an element of expressing pain and sorrow,” Torre said. “I love how the guitar is supposed to be grittier and rough in comparison with a classical context.”

Unlike classical ballet, where the ability to interpret the rhythm, tempo, melody and mood of music is a key skill for dancers, flamenco musicians respond to the singers and dancers.

“When the singer sings, we have to play chords that are appropriately supporting the notes the singer is singing, and when the dancer dances we have to be appropriately responding in the moment to what they are asking for,” Torre said. “We have to keep up with the energy of both.”

Torre said “De Ayer a Hoy” promises to be an exploration of the history of Theatre Flamenco, and that it involves a natural progression of time.

“The audience can expect to have an experience that is a beautiful presentation of flamenco not bound to any one moment in time, but truly representative of the art form as a whole,” Torre said. “And every art form in that sense is always changing.”

First published in the San Francisco Examiner, October 12, 2026

'They were people who took chances': The Vikings who reached the Americas 500 years before Columbus

By Fiona Macdonald

The Norse made it to Canada around the year 1000, and used it as a base to explore. The BBC has delved into the "lost history" of the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic.

Christopher Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue in 1492 – arriving in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492, to be precise – but he wasn't the first European to reach what we now know as the Americas. His predecessors did so without much fanfare: no royal proclamations or crowds lining the streets to greet them upon their return. And they didn't sail directly across the vast Atlantic Ocean from one continent to another.

Instead, they hopped their way there, with Iceland and Greenland as staging posts. Their exploration was retold, centuries later, in sagas that were the stuff of epic literature rather than history books. And they made their first journey to American soil 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

The Norse sagas – Viking stories written down by their descendants – have come to be recognised as containing reliable historical truths. In 1966, BBC presenter Magnus Magnusson described the 14th-Century Flateyjarbók, or Flatey Island Book, as "one of the most valuable Icelandic manuscripts in existence". The book is so valuable, he added, that when, in 1893, the organisers of the Chicago World's Fair asked to borrow it for their belated 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus's voyage, "they offered to send a warship to Denmark to pick it up and an armoured train to transport it across America and to insure it for a sum of $1 million [the book was housed in Denmark at the time.] But even at that, the Danes didn't care to take the risk."

And the reason the Americans "wanted to borrow it so badly"? Because the book contains "the account of the Norse settlement of Greenland in the 10th Century, and even more astonishingly, the story of the Norse discovery and attempted colonisation of North America a few years later – five centuries before Columbus".

In 1960, a Norse transit camp was discovered at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. And in 2021, researchers using a new dating technique found that Vikings had occupied the site 1,000 years earlier. It is believed to have served as a base camp for exploring deeper into North America. "This is the start of a lost history, the centuries when Europeans visited America in voyages whose records are written only on the water," said Robin Ellis in a 1997 episode of the BBC documentary series, Timewatch.

The Norse had found Iceland in around 870, and Greenland 100 years later. From there, it was just 200 miles across the Davis Strait to Baffin Island in modern Canada, which they called Helluland, the land of slabs. According to the sagas, they followed the coast southwards to Labrador, or Markland, the land of forests, and then further south to what they called Vinland, the land of vines. "The sagas describe not only these guys stopping off in one place, but stopping off in a number of places," Emily Lethbridge of the University of Iceland said on Timewatch in 2016. "And they left for several years. They had a whole new world to explore."

The sagas say that the most famous settler, Erik the Red, arrived in Iceland in around 960 after his father was banished from Norway for murder. In the year 932, the Icelanders had established a parliament, the Althing. It was an open-air assembly of the whole nation, meeting every summer for a fortnight for legislative and judicial purposes – and it took place in a remarkable setting, inside a ravine that made an extraordinary natural amphitheatre.

"It isn’t just the acoustics that make this place special," Lethbridge told the BBC. "This is a natural fault line. We’re on the point where the North American and the Eurasian tectonic plates meet." The first Europeans to explore North America happened to have sited one of their parliaments in a rift valley between the two continents.

At the parliament, said Lethbridge, "Sentences of outlawry would be imposed on members of society who had broken all of the rules. You could go anywhere else, but you couldn’t set foot on Iceland for the period that the outlawry stood."

The Althing banished Erik the Red from Iceland in 982, following a violent dispute with a neighbouring farmer – and his exile launched an astonishing chapter in Viking exploration. "Erik the Red was the first Icelander to discover Greenland and then make a permanent settlement there," said Lethbridge.

He started a colony on Greenland that would last for around 500 years and be the launching point for the Norse exploration of North America. "They were people who took chances and were prepared to undergo huge physical trials," said Lethbridge, "such as sailing in open boats across the Atlantic, to see what they could find." 

The Norse settlement on Greenland continued until the early 15th Century, and the Vikings – led by Erik's son Leif Eriksson – appear to have made not just one but multiple journeys across the sea from there to North America. 

"Most people assume that after Leif Eriksson and his friends came to Vinland and then gave up and went away, nothing more was heard of the New World," Robert McGhee, an archaeologist at the Canadian Museum of Civilisation, told Timewatch. "But archaeologically, we have evidence which shows that the Norse were at least making occasional trips to the New World for the following two or three centuries."

Did Columbus know about Vinland?

"We have so many good reasons to know that travels did take place throughout the entire Middle Ages on the two coasts that we call Greenland and North America," Kirsten Seaver, a historian of medieval shipping, told Timewatch. "By 1480, we know that they deliberately tried to sail to North America, or what they called the Isle of Brazil. We shouldn't look upon that as their first voyage, but as their first attempt to do it directly, without going via Greenland, which was the ordinary navigational marker."

Seaver also cited a document which implied that Columbus himself knew about such voyages. "In the winter of 1497-98, an Englishman named John Day wrote to Christopher Columbus to tell him about John Cabot's successful 1497 voyage to North America. And among many other things, he mentioned as a matter of course that as Columbus knew, men from Bristol [in England] had made this voyage to the northern part for many years already." 

By the time Columbus reached the shores of the Bahamas in 1492, then, the place the Vikings called Vinland could already have been on his radar. There are even theories that Columbus was deliberately attempting to avoid a land he knew had already been discovered by Europeans. 

"Columbus knew as well as any navigator does today that if you want to travel across oceans [in the Northern Hemisphere]... you move up into the north where the latitudes are short, and you zip across, and then you go back down again," McGhee told Timewatch. "Instead, Columbus took the long way around directly across the ocean. Perhaps he was trying to avoid Canada. Maybe he was trying to avoid Vinland… which was not what he was looking for. I think Columbus's intent was to bypass America and therefore try to get to the riches of the Far East." 

So while many US citizens celebrate Columbus Day every October, they shouldn't forget all the Atlantic crossings that came first. 

First published at BBC, October 12, 2026

Piano taken down gold mine for unique underground concert in Bendigo

By Anna McGuiness

A unique piano concert 61 metres underground in an old gold mine.

That was the brainwave of Bendigo Fine Music chair Thomas Heywood.

And yesterday that brainwave became reality, with a piano descending into the Central Deborah Gold Mine in Bendigo for a one-off evening performance.

The 300kg piano was formerly owned by Mr Heywood's mother, who was a renowned concert pianist.

"It's one of those classic 'don't drop the piano' scenarios," Mr Heywood said.

"We couldn't find any evidence that this has been done before.

"It's really quite emotional; it sounds fantastic in here. It is an amazing room for sound. There's a timber ceiling and hardstone walls, and they're ideal for musical performance."

Thomas Heywood came up with the idea of holding the concert in a gold mine to mark 175 years since gold
was discovered in Bendigo. (ABC News: Tyrone Dalton)

The Bendigo Fine Music event celebrated 175 years since gold was first discovered in the central Victorian city.

"In 1851, it changed our wonderful country forever,"  Mr Heywood said.

"We were always taught in school that basically the riches that followed from gold made possible what would have taken 500 years in European history to be achieved in a mere 50 years to Federation."

Friday's concert was limited to 60 attendees, who were allowed to remove their hard hats once in the concert room.

Pianist Yasmin Rowe said performing this rare and unusual concert was exciting.

"I've never played underground before, and this is just so special. When I entered this room, I thought it was so, so beautiful," Ms Rowe said.

"You've got this millions-of-years-old rock there right behind the piano; the light, the colour, the atmosphere is wonderful."

Yasmin Rowe and Ian Munro played before an audience of 60 people. (ABC News: Tyrone Dalton)

Ms Rowe and fellow pianist Ian Munro said the underground concert made playing the piano interesting again.

"It's quite a dry acoustic. We have to adjust in real time, so using less pedal cause it's quite reverberant."

Mr Munro said the rare and unusual concert brought back the memory of a conversation with his piano teacher at the age of 14, who questioned whether he would continue to love playing the piano as an adult.

"When I was 30 [and still loved playing piano], and now I'm very much older than 30, I'm still very interested; it's still got that magic for me."

The operation to get the instrument underground was a family affair by Joshua McPherson, his wife Jo and son Sam.

Mr McPherson said it was "definitely the most unusual" place he had ever taken a piano.

The disassembled instrument was wheeled on a trolley into a lift and rolled along the rocky tunnels of the mine.

"We were worried about moisture dropping from the ceiling — that was our main concern. [It was] a little bit rough underfoot but nothing scary really," he said.

Nic Hamilton was tasked with making sure the piano stayed in tune.  (ABC News: Anna McGuinness)

Once in place, it was over to piano technician Nic Hamilton to ensure nothing had gone awry on the journey and to tune the piano before the concert.

"It's on the humid side but it takes some hours, perhaps even overnight to seep into the piano and cause any problems,"  he said.

"It's a fun thing to do, and it's very typical of Thomas [Heywood] to come up with projects that are interesting and exciting."

The piano is moved into the entrance to Central Deborah Gold Mine. (ABC News: Anna McGuinness)

First published at ABC News, October 10, 2026

'An object of lust': How the ancient Greek goddess Aphrodite became a controversial symbol of love and sex

By Matthew Wilson

Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos was lost but later Roman copies like the Capitoline Venus are similar
(Credit: The Ashmolean Museum)

Artworks depicting Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty, have long been branded obscene, objectifying the female body. How did she become one of the most controversial figures in the history of art?

The nudity of Aphrodite (or Venus as she was known by the ancient Romans), has been a topic of debate for centuries.

In 1880, the shocked author Mark Twain called Titan’s Venus of Urbino (1534) ”the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses". In 1914, the suffragette Mary Richardson hacked Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus (c 1647-51) with a meat cleaver at least three times in the middle of London's National Gallery. "I didn't like the way men visitors gaped at it all day long," was one of her later explanations.

Aphrodite: the Makingof a Godess, a new exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, explores the history of the goddess. It helps to explain how she evolved into a lightning rod of such intense cultural controversy.

There are two versions of her origin story: a mythological one and a historically accurate one, and neither particularly marks her out as a future troublemaker. In myth, the tale begins with Kronos castrating his father Ouranos and flinging his genitals into the sea; foam began to bubble to the surface, and out of it arose a fully formed Aphrodite. She glided across the waves to the island of Cyprus, where her footsteps caused flowers to bloom miraculously from the land.

“One of [Aphrodite's] names is Pandemos: the goddess of all people. It's not just the warriors, or the women: love affects everybody and everything. It pervades life – Anja Ulbrich

The historical version of Aphrodite's birth also begins on Cyprus, where she emerged as a deity around 1200BC. She was a distinctive new addition to the pantheon but had features that had apparently evolved from older Middle Eastern goddesses like Ishtar, Astarte and Hathor. For these archaic goddesses, "sexuality, love and fertility were their core characteristics," Anja Ulbrich, curator of the Ashmolean exhibition, tells the BBC, "but they all had more than one function".

And the same applied to Aphrodite, who in her early years wasn't just a goddess of romantic love, but of all physical love and procreation – in the animal and plant world as much as the human realm. And there are other, perhaps less well-known, sides to her persona. She fought in the Trojan War – and this warrior aspect of her personality led her to be worshipped by the ancient Greek navy.

In 1914, the suffragette Mary Richardson hacked Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus (c 1647-51) with a meat cleaver in London's National Gallery (Credit: The National Gallery, London)

The historical version of Aphrodite's birth also begins on Cyprus, where she emerged as a deity around 1200BC. She was a distinctive new addition to the pantheon but had features that had apparently evolved from older Middle Eastern goddesses like Ishtar, Astarte and Hathor. For these archaic goddesses, "sexuality, love and fertility were their core characteristics," Anja Ulbrich, curator of the Ashmolean exhibition, tells the BBC, "but they all had more than one function".

And the same applied to Aphrodite, who in her early years wasn't just a goddess of romantic love, but of all physical love and procreation – in the animal and plant world as much as the human realm. And there are other, perhaps less well-known, sides to her persona. She fought in the Trojan War – and this warrior aspect of her personality led her to be worshipped by the ancient Greek navy.

Following her original appearance on Cyprus back in the 13th Century BC, Aphrodite became a big hit with people, and worship of her spread all around ancient Greece. Why was she so appealing? "Fertility, love, procreation is a topic across humanity, no matter which culture," Ulbrich says. "One of her names is Pandemos: the goddess of all people. It's not just the warriors, or the women: love affects everybody and everything. It pervades life."

A new kind of nudity

So far, so uncontroversial. For several hundred years, artists didn't make Aphrodite look particularly different from other female Olympian goddesses. And in her early years, they did not typically depict her naked, and certainly never in the more provocative poses we now associate with her. But then, in 350BC, an artwork appeared that changed everything.

Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos (c 350BC) was the first completely nude artwork of a woman in ancient Greece. The original sculpture is lost, but we can get a good picture of what it looked like by later Roman copies like the Capitoline Venus (c 160BC).

Before Praxiteles, it was only male figures who were shown undressed. "Celebrating physical male beauty through nudity was perfectly normal from the 7th or 6th Century BC onwards," Ulbrich says. So, Praxiteles chose to do the same for female physical beauty.

Aphrodite's nudity was different. If you look closely, you can see how dissimilar the presentation of nudity is in Greek male sculptures: it's all in the body language. Praxiteles's Aphrodite is shown caught whilst bathing. She appears shy and vulnerable, covering herself in shame or embarrassment, whereas the nude male body in Greek art had always been shown as confident and heroic. Ulbrich explains: "It is mostly based on how she's presented in myths, where she is constantly bathing and working on her physical beauty."

But in Praxiteles's artwork, Aphrodite's hands are positioned slightly away from her, making it possible for a viewer to see her exposed body if they look at it from different angles. It's an artwork that invites interaction, and rewards the spectator for their sensual curiosity. These innovative artistic techniques would cause heated debate in centuries to come, and a name was coined for the pose of the Praxiteles's sculpture: the Venus Pudica (modest or shameful).

The Aphrodite of Knidos was "revolutionary," says Ulbrich. Before Praxiteles, Aphrodite might be recognisable in sculptures from a range of different items of clothing, jewellery and other attributes. Afterwards, he says, "the nudity basically takes over."

It's worth acknowledging that a naked body is completely natural, and not controversial in its own right. What would make Aphrodite so provocative in later years was not her being undressed, but how her body was posed for the gratification of a viewer. It turned her into an object of lust.

Praxiteles's original sculpture was so inspirational that it was later copied thousands of times by Roman sculptors, of which the Capitoline Venus is just one famous example. A new way of looking at women's bodies in art had been unleashed by the Venus Pudica, and it spread to all the territories governed by the Roman Empire including Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Aphrodite's erotic rebirth

But the influence was not restricted to the ancient world. During the Renaissance, artists began to seek out and copy classical sculptures with more determination than they had for a millennium. And one of the most admired was the Venus Pudica type. So, Aphrodite, in her nude, seductive and humble persona, as devised by Praxiteles, was reborn in artworks by Massaccio, Botticelli, Raphael and Titian – artists who would later become the "great names" of art history. Some artists used the pose to depict Aphrodite, but many adopted it for other types of female figure. It also inspired other artists to devise new poses based on the same essential premise of diffident nudity.

Aphrodite was reborn in artworks such as Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and Yves Klein's 20th Century version
(Credit: The Ashmolean Museum)

And so, via artists' repeated rehashing of the Venus Pudica, the objectified female form became an indelible feature of the art historical canon. Rubens and Velázquez reincarnated it in the Baroque period. It was revived by Cabanel and Manet in the 1800s, and by Modigliani and Yves Klein in the 20th Century. The outrage of Mark Twain and Mary Richardson are responses to this history of Aphrodite's eroticisation. 

And so, via artists' repeated rehashing of the Venus Pudica, the objectified female form became an indelible feature of the art historical canon. Rubens and Velázquez reincarnated it in the Baroque period. It was revived by Cabanel and Manet in the 1800s, and by Modigliani and Yves Klein in the 20th Century. The outrage of Mark Twain and Mary Richardson are responses to this history of Aphrodite's eroticisation. 

As the symbol of ultimate beauty and desirability, Aphrodite has been adapted and reconfigured to reflect the needs of her audience for 3,000 years and counting, a remarkable lifespan for an ancient Greek deity. Another astonishing idea is that a single sculpture – Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos – has shaped our attitudes to nudity so profoundly.

There's no sign of her dominance over mortal affairs ending, or her controversy subsiding – the subject of beauty and how it is handled will be forever relevant, and always up for debate, reflecting public opinion as it unfolds over time. "Depending on the context, people have just narrowed her down to what they need and what they want," says Ulbrich. "She is very versatile, you know."

Aphrodite: The Making of a Goddess is at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum until April 2027

First published at BBC, October 8, 2026

Did a Scottish film 'beat Hollywood to the punch' as the first ever talkie?

Playwright Graham Moffat played the character John Snodgrass, with his wife Margaret playing Janet Struthers,
in the play Till the Bells Ring

By Pauline McLean

"Wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet."

That promise, spoken by Al Jolson in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, made movie history.

The first recorded dialogue on film, Jolson's eight well-chosen words marked the birth of the "talkies", delivered by one of the biggest stars on Earth.

The moment has long been celebrated in popular culture - most memorably in the 1952 film Singin' in the Rain - and there are plans for a variety of events to mark the centenary next year.

But what if those words weren't the first?

Researcher Marc David Jacobs has uncovered evidence that the first-ever talking feature film was Scottish.

And it was screened in Edinburgh - a whole year before Jolson's voice hit the cinemas.

The film was based on this stage production

Graham Moffat was a Glaswegian playwright who wrote plays for his touring company. In 1925 he decided to turn his debut play, Till the Bells Ring, into a film.

He approached a London-based company called De Forest Phonofilm, which had patented a system which allowed synchronised audio to be recorded directly onto film.

The early quality was poor, and it was mostly used to record short performances such as vaudeville or music hall acts.

But the Moffats had a much more ambitious plan in mind.

They wanted the entire company involved in a 45-minute feature film with synchronised sound and dialogue throughout.

The cast of six included his wife Margaret - a noted actress and one of the first suffragettes to be arrested in Scotland - and his daughter, Winnifred Moffat.

There was even a role for their dog.

A year later, they screened the film, first at a disastrous private demonstration which was marred by faulty equipment.

And then on 11 October in Poole's Synod Hall in Edinburgh, where it was billed as "a super talking picture of Victorian Scottish life".

Jacobs said: "Silent movie audiences would have been used to walking in and out, or leaving halfway through so people had to be warned not to come in in the middle of the film and disturb everyone.

"They had to be told not to talk themselves, just as if they were at an actual play.

"And people do, and it's amazing.

"You can see in the reviews, even the sort of people who are professionally being paid to watch these films, there's a sense of wonder."

An advertisement in the Edinburgh Evening News from October 1926 - calling the film a "super talking picture"

The film ran for a week, with the Scotsman reporting "the movement and sound are perfectly synchronised and after the listener becomes accustomed to the phenomenon of screen figures appearing to talk and the ear attunes itself to the sounds there is no difficulty in catching the spoken words."

The paper also commended Graham Moffat's "true Scottish humour" and was so impressed with the offering it sent a reporter back for a second screening.

The film was clearly well-marketed and caught the attention of the press.

So why has it fallen into obscurity in the history of sound on film?

According to Jacobs, the film was acquired by an unscrupulous exhibitor who re-released it in 1933 as a brand-new film.

Moffat sued and won his case in 1935, after which all copies of the feature were returned to him. But the film was apparently never shown again.

He died in Cape Town in December 1951, never having made another.

One of his plays - Bunty Pulls the Strings - became a huge hit on Broadway, but his landmark contribution to cinema has never been recognised or celebrated.

Marc David Jacobs said there was a "sense of wonder" in the reviews for the Scottish talkie

And the film itself? Jacobs believes the only surviving copy of Till the Bells Ring is in the BFI National Archive in Hertfordshire.

It has not been shown privately or publicly since being acquired by the BFI more than 50 years ago.

He hopes the print can be examined and restored and a search undertaken for any other surviving material.

And he feels that would see the Moffats and their film get the credit they are due.

"I was amazed to discover the unbelievable story of the Scottish family production that beat Hollywood to the punch," he said.

"But I was even more astonished by the complete lack of interest in it.

"It was as if it was impossible to believe that a major piece of world cinema could have come out of a tiny London studio, hired by a canny Glaswegian playwright.

"But it did. And nearly a century after it was last seen, the time has finally come for the world to recognise Graham and Maggie Moffat's world-beating achievement."

And the first words ever spoken in the world's first talking feature?

The heroine, Aggie, says: "Still anither mornin' and never a word or a sign o' him.

Eh, me! The sun's gettin' through, so we'll be wearin' oor braws to the kirk the day."

To be fair, Al probably had the better line.

First published at BBC, October 6 2026