Sometimes it feels like the growing subset of films set in the stuffy British academic world of the early ’70s deserve a genre all to themselves. It’s a very interesting visual paradox; young people going out into the world to discover and further themselves in an environment that’s been stained nicotine-brown by the chain-smokers of their parents’ generation. Beer comes in heavy pint mugs, to be drunk in “snugs”, at pubs that most people get to and from in rickety death-trap cars almost a decade before seatbelts were made compulsory.

This world is the setting for a real-life road trip taken by American writer Jay Parini (played by Fionn Whitehead), who, in 1971, enrolled at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland to fulfil his dream of becoming a poet. Parini is trying to put his old life behind him; on his conscience is the fact that he has inadvertently inspired his younger brother Billy to sign up for service in the Vietnam war. Billy sends him diary-like cassette tapes from the heart of the combat zone that become increasingly bleak, making Parini’s quest to find a mentor — “someone who would help me become a writer” — all the more desperate.

Parini goes through a series of mentors, the first being academic scholar Alistair Reid (Alan Cumming), who agrees to help Parini if he helps his pre-teen son Jasper with tuition in return. Alistair has the Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges (Luis Gnecco) coming to stay, but Parini seems oddly unconcerned by the imminent arrival of this master of letters. Instead, Parini is planning, as part of his PhD project, to interview reclusive poet George Mackay Brown (Peter Mullan), who never leaves his hometown in Orkney. In a very plausible exchange, Parini’s tutor is appalled, telling him, “We prefer our poets dead in Scotland,” adding that the aim of the course is “to study writers, not become one.”

In a further blow, Parini’s plans go right off the rails when Alistair has some bad news from London and leaves him in charge of the elderly, ailing Borges, then 72. Saving Parini the bother of canceling the interview, Borges gamely offers to join him on a road trip to Orkney. “I’ve always wanted to see the Highlands,” he says, despite having become totally blind in 1955. “You will be my eyes.”

According to a title card at the end of the movie, almost everything that happens in the film is true, to a degree. That intel would be better placed at the start, since it takes a while to get into the rhythm of this sometimes hallucinatory journey. For a time, there’s a possibility that Borges might not even be real, since he speaks in epigrams such as “I believe in everything”. His childlike enthusiasm is endearing, though, as he imagines Parini as Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, pausing to visit the Carnegie Library where he horrifies the stuck-up staff by licking a leather-bound copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica. “Some books should be tasted,” he explains, before peeing in the car park.

Curiously, Borges drops out of the story for a while after a trip to Loch Ness, where Parini develops a crush on a well-read hotel worker (Freya Mavor) who, being a fellow poetry aficionado, offers to join him for the Orkney leg of the trip. Up to now, the prospect of the two poets meeting has been an enticing one, but it never happens. By contrast, Brown is in some ways the polar opposite of Borges: Dry, and gnomic, he rejects the romanticization of art, speaking rapturously of beer and saying, of his work, that “a poem is the next best thing to silence”. (Tellingly, he also admits that “I live too much in my own head.”)

When Parini returns to rejoin Borges, the film has lost a little of its steam, perhaps since the road trip has already reached its destination. Nevertheless, in this final stretch, director Marc Turtletaub unexpectedly delivers the film’s most striking scene, in which Parini takes Borges to the site of the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and the pair commune to summon up the brave, rebellious ghosts of the past. It’s the only point in the film in which Parini — a serious fellow, more like a young Michael Foot than the velour-jacketed hippies in his year — seems to bond with his riding partner, and it’s a rare moment in which the film actually bends towards Borges’ metafictional genius. Though it is undoubtedly smart, literary and playful, Borges and Me could do with a spot more of that.

Title: Borges And Me
Festival: Edinburgh (Out of Competition)
Director: Marc Turtletaub
Screenwriters: Oren Moverman, Jay Parini
Cast: Alan Cumming, Fionn Whitehead, Freya Mavor, John Gordon Sinclair, Luis Gnecco, Morven Christie, Peter Mullan, Stuart Bowman
Running time: 1 hr 49 mins

Music is a blessing, but maybe it can also be a curse – especially if you are a famous musician who gets remembered mostly for drugs and other negative narratives. Too Much Music, one of the works-in-progress showcased at the 2026 edition of Open Doors, the Locarno Film Festival‘s co-production platform and talent development program for filmmakers from equity-seeking communities and regions where artistic expression is at risk, wants to explore all these issues.

It comes from director Aseye Fiagbe (short The Gentleman, episode 7 of Bad Mama) and puts a spotlight on a famous keyboardist from Ghana, Kiki Gyan.

The director is also the producer of the doc via her Aseye Fiagbe Creative Studio in Ghana. She presented the project during the second edition of Open Doors with a focus on films from Africa and won one of three Open Doors Grants.

THR has compiled highlights about the movie and insight from Fiagbe about the project and the themes it explores.

Synopsis
Too Much Music is a feature documentary about Kiki Gyan, a Ghanaian keyboard prodigy who rose to international fame as a teenager with Afro-rock pioneers Osibisa. As his musical contributions expanded without recognition, tensions around credit and ownership led him to leave the band and pursue a solo career across London, Lagos and New York, shaping African disco and funk in the process.

Over time, the same system that profited from his brilliance proved indifferent to his vulnerability, and his life became reduced to a singular narrative of addiction and demise. Through archival material and testimonies from family and collaborators, the film reconstructs the forces that shaped his journey and asks how artists are remembered, who controls their stories, and what is lost when brilliance is reframed as failure.

Director’s note
Music is a blessing, and Kiki Gyan had that gift in abundance. His music is joyful, infectious, technically brilliant, and yet his life story often overshadows the work itself. Many people know how he died long before they encounter the music he made. That imbalance is what pulled me into this film. I grew up with Osibisa as the soundtrack of Sunday afternoons in my home. Years later, I discovered Kiki’s solo work and realized how much of his brilliance had been hidden behind a simplified story of addiction and death. 

Too Much Music is not about rescuing him or forcing his life into a neat redemption arc. I am interested in complexity: holding brilliance, failure, joy, exploitation, vulnerability, and legacy in the same frame. As a Ghanaian filmmaker, I see this film as part of a larger responsibility to document our cultural history with care. Kiki’s story is about memory and erasure, about who gets remembered for their work and who is remembered only for how they fell.

What was the inspiration for you to want to make this film?
I grew up with Osibisa as part of the soundtrack of life in Ghana, but the story I knew about Kiki Gyan was basically the story of how he died. He was a brilliant prodigy who became addicted to drugs, lost everything and died in a church bathroom. That was the story.

Then, as an adult, I started discovering how much music he had actually made and how little of it I knew. I realized that, like many other Ghanaians, I knew the ending of his life before I really knew the work. That bothered me, and the more I researched him, the more complicated, colorful and human the story became.

How universal are the themes of the film, and why should people outside Mozambique see it?
For me, the film is ultimately about memory and who gets reduced to what. We do this all the time. A whole person can become one mistake, one tragedy, one headline. Kiki’s story happens within a very particular Ghanaian and African music history, but the questions underneath it feel universal.

What happens when talent arrives before someone is ready for everything that comes with it? Who gets credit for creative work? How do we treat people when they fall from the pedestal we put them on? And who gets to decide what remains of someone after they are gone? I don’t think you need to know Kiki Gyan or Osibisa to recognize those questions.

What is the next step for you and your collaborators after Open Doors?
Open Doors gave the project a real push forward, through the conversations we had, the connections forged and the award, which gives us so much room to continue the development work. The writing and research are still ongoing, particularly around London, Lagos and the U.S., and we are continuing our archival research while building the international production structure around the film. A big focus now is following up with the producers, financiers and other partners I met in Locarno and finding the right co-production relationships. We came to Locarno with a Ghanaian film looking for the right international collaborators. I left feeling much clearer about what those relationships should actually look like.

The happiest place on earth just got more global. At the D23’s Saturday Parks Panel, host Neil Patrick Harris gave way to several Walt Disney Imagineers who shared the next steps in the mouse house’s billion-dollar expansion.
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In the U.S., executives and creative designers showed off a sneak peek of upcoming West Coast attractions at Disney California Adventure. Coming to Avengers Campus to join the likes of Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout! and Web Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure are two new attractions. The first is a flight-spinning ride called Stark Flight Lab, which will see guests take on training trips from returning Avengers cast members Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Mackie and Brie Larson. The second big-ticket attraction will be Avengers Infinity Defense, a ride that puts the fight against Thanos in the hands of park visitors. As they enter, riders will receive special mission orders from Ms. Marvel (featuring a role reprisal from Iman Vellani) and team up with Avengers and their returning actors, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Captain America (Mackie), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Iron Man (Downey Jr.). Both attractions will open in 2028.