About Us
Photo credit: Tyna Redpath
Kevin Redpath is a filmmaker, producer and storyteller
We arrived in Glastonbury in 1982, when it was a small Somerset market town balanced between the ordinary and the extraordinary. There was a cattle market, four banks, an independent grocer, a Woolworths and a single alternative bookshop. The High Street shook beneath a constant stream of traffic before the town's bypass was built.
On summer afternoons, you could find yourself alone on Glastonbury Tor, looking out across the Somerset Levels.
That year, after forty-five consecutive days of rain, Glastonbury Festival welcomed 25,000 people, as Van Morrison headlined the Pyramid Stage for the first time. The Festival ticket cost £8. Beyond the festival, another story was unfolding in the town itself. Alternative health centres, community ventures, and independent businesses began to emerge. The Wheel of the Year, once celebrated quietly by small groups, slowly re-emerged into public life.
Over the following decades, Glastonbury transformed itself into one of the most distinctive cultural landscapes in Britain: a place where myth and everyday life coexist, where Carnival processions, Beltane fires, Samhain ceremonies, charity Zombie Walks, pilgrimages, and community gatherings all share the same streets.
A Glastonbury Tale is structured around the nine parts of the Mass and driven by Judge's powerful rock-infused requiem. Save for a brief, penitent, address by a time-travelling Henry VIII who happened to be passing through, it is sung in Latin throughout and performed by an extraordinary ensemble of musicians and singers.
The film is neither a conventional history nor a portrait of a single event. Instead, I have tried to record a living community and the rituals that bind it together. Through music, celebration, memory, and shared experience, the film traces the life of a town continually reinventing itself whilst remaining rooted to its spiritual heritage.
The making of the film became inseparable from my own journey of loss. Production was bookended by the deaths of my parents, and there were moments when the challenge of translating the huge emotional range of Judge's music into moving images felt completely overwhelming. At one point I laid the whole project down for nine months, unable to complete it.
At its heart, A Glastonbury Tale belongs to the people of the town. It honours the performers, artists, drummers, dancers, and ceremonialists who animate its festivals, and the bakers, mechanics, librarians, printers, gardeners, councillors, volunteers, and countless other folk whose daily work sustains our town.
In a world increasingly shaped by division and isolation, Glastonbury can offer a different possibility — a place where music, ceremony and story can help build a strong, resilient community.
I hope A Glastonbury Tale reflects this.
Join us on the journey — follow upcoming screenings, stories, and behind-the-scenes insights from A Glastonbury Tale.
Connect with Kevin:
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Somerset Film
Judge Smith is a composer, librettist and musical innovator.
As a founding member of Van der Graaf Generator in 1967, Judge helped shape one of progressive rock’s most distinctive and literate voices. After leaving the band early on, he pursued a solo path defined by restless creativity and genre-crossing experimentation.
Over the decades, Judge has written stage musicals, operas, chamber works, film scores, and a string of acclaimed “songstories”—a form he pioneered that fuses narrative and music into extended cinematic experiences for the ear.
His Requiem Mass, completed over several years, is a deeply felt response to themes of death, remembrance, and transcendence. While it draws on the structure and tradition of the Latin Mass for the Dead, the piece is entirely original in tone, combining solemnity with dramatic, often electrifying shifts in musical texture.
Particularly striking is his setting of Dies Irae—a medieval poem about the Day of Judgment—interpreted here with an unapologetically rock-and-roll energy that challenges and redefines sacred music.
In A Glastonbury Tale, Judge's Requiem does not merely underscore the visuals—it acts as a spiritual framework, guiding the viewer through the emotional and symbolic journey of the town and its people. The pairing of sound and image invites the audience to reflect on continuity, change, and the sacredness of everyday life.
Join us on the journey — follow upcoming screenings, stories, and behind-the-scenes insights from A Glastonbury Tale.
Connect with Judge:
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