ON Sunday afternoon at Glasgow Film Theatre, a Gaelic psalm will swell out of Screen 1 – brought to the audience by a new feature documentary having its world premiere at Glasgow Film Festival.
Sailm nan Daoine (Psalms of the People) – Jack Archer’s documentary about Scotland’s cultural heritage of traditional Gaelic psalm singing – follows psalm precentor Rob MacNeacail from the Borders.
Focusing initially on the uplifting musical journey of MacNeacail’s Carlops singing group, audiences are led from a church hall in the Borders to island congregations and on to related Irish traditions – and we meet Rob in the shadow of his father’s death.
“Essentially, it’s about a musician who is rekindling the culture around Gaelic psalm singing, following the death of his father,” Archer explains.
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“It starts from that really personal place, but quite quickly it opens out into something much wider. He goes on a kind of road trip to explore not only the different threads that feed into Gaelic psalm singing, but Gaelic culture in general.”
The journey the audience joins goes from Lewis all the way down to County Cork, and along the way we are introduced to people who share their songs and thoughts about the language as a whole.
“There’s no big plot twist waiting at the end of it – it’s not that sort of film – but you come away feeling like you’ve travelled through a whole landscape of language, music and memory with him.”
Across Scotland and Ireland, MacNeacail is seen celebrating his cultural heritage and encouraging Gaelic and non‑Gaelic speakers alike to take up the tradition.
Archer and MacNeacail knew each other from Archer’s previous film, Bill Douglas: My Best Friend, where MacNeacail did the sound.
“He’s a sound designer among other things, and the mix he did on that film was just incredible – it felt like a real work of poetic genius,” Archer recalls.
“When we started talking about psalm singing, it became clear that what he’s doing now in Plockton is very similar to what people did for him when he was younger. He talked a lot about the people who helped and supported him in terms of Gaelic when he was growing up. Now he’s the one patiently explaining every word to other people, taking time with them, letting conversations happen. It made me realise that his story is as much about that act of passing something on as it is about the music itself.”
Archer quickly saw this was a story worth capturing, and pitched it to BBC Alba, who “very quickly” agreed that there should be a film.
“They could see straight away there was something special in what Rob was doing. At first the form was still up for discussion. It could have been a shorter broadcast piece or something a bit more conventional. I pushed quite hard for it to be a feature documentary, because we wanted to give the psalms time to breathe and to give Rob room to express himself.”
BBC Alba and MG Alba, he says, were supportive at every step, sharing his belief that “Gaelic can absolutely carry a feature‑length, cinematic documentary. It doesn’t have to be confined to a niche slot on television.”
“In the end I shot most of it myself. We did have a second camera, Anna Garvin, who came in for things like Lewis and was incredibly helpful, but for the most part it was just me running after Rob. The advantage of that is that you’re not tied to a big crew or a rigid shot list. You can follow your nose a bit more.
!That inevitably means you have a few false starts and some sequences that don’t make it into the final cut, but the trade‑off is that you capture a lot more of the real, emotional things that happen in between. All the wee moments – the glances, the jokes, the slightly awkward conversations, the points where a song suddenly takes off in the room – those are what make the film for me. And they only really happen if people forget that the camera is there.”
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That intimacy is sharpened by the fact the film unfolds in the aftermath of the death of Rob’s father, the late Angus MacNeacail.
A towering figure in the Gaelic world – a poet, broadcaster and tireless advocate for the language whose work helped give modern Gaelic writing its shape – Angus’s presence is felt in the film precisely because he is no longer there. For his son, the loss means without his father at home, the everyday space where he spoke Gaelic has gone.
“From Rob’s point of view it’s a very personal film, because it’s made in the aftermath of his father’s death. But he’s also dealing with a sacred tradition, and he’s very aware of that,” Archer says.
“At one point he said, ‘It’s not a bag of sweeties.’ As a musician, especially if you’re adventurous, the temptation is to treat things like a pick‑and‑mix – you take a melody from here and a texture from there and you just go wild with it. You can’t do that with something like Gaelic psalms. It means too much to people, and not just as music. It’s bound up with spiritual life, with language, with family history and community.
"I felt a big duty of care as a filmmaker, and I know Rob felt the same as a musician. Even if that’s not always spelled out in the film, we were both very conscious of wanting to tread carefully and make something that people inside that tradition would recognise as being respectful.”
Angus’s legacy strongly carriers the film and now the audience sees his son’s attempts to keep singing – and speaking – Gaelic alive around him.
“I think one of the things that came out clearly in the edit is the sense that Angus had given him the gift of Gaelic. He didn’t just support Gaelic in a general, public way, he also encouraged his son specifically,” Archer reflects.
“With Angus gone, Rob is very aware that he’s holding something that was passed on to him, and the question becomes: what do you do with that? We realised that a lot of what he does – the weekly psalm group, the patience with learners, the sheer enthusiasm he has for the music – is about passing that gift on again.
"There’s a metaphor he uses about an apple tree, where his teachers are the tree and he and the other pupils are the apples that have fallen from it, and that really seemed to sum it up. I don’t know if Rob would phrase it exactly like this, but I do think he’s been given a gift and he’s making very good use of it.”
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