Project Detail

Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande

Synopsis

They are the unsung heroes of hip hop, disco and a host of other genres, whose message of peace, love and funk sailed beyond Britain's shores and helped shape music for five decades. Long after they stopped playing, the music played on, so they returned to play some more.
In the racially turbulent UK of the early 70s, a group of black musicians came together in South London with a common love of rhythms and a message of peace. Cymande – with the dove as their symbol – combined jazz, funk, soul and Caribbean grooves to form a unique sound. Despite success in the USA they faced indifference in their native Britain, becoming disillusioned and disbanding. But the music lived on, as new generations of artists imbibed and reworked their pioneering sounds in fresh ways. From Soul II Soul to De La Soul, MC Solaar to The Fugees, the Dove had spread Cymande's message far and wide, prompting their return after forty years. This is their story.
Official Selection SXSW Film Festival 2022 - World premiere

Details

Year
2022
Type of project
Features
Running time
89 min
Director
Tim Mackenzie-Smith
Producer
Tim Mackenzie-Smith, Matt Wyllie
Executive Producer
John Battsek, Daniel Gordon
Editor
Matt Wyllie
Director of Photography
David Corfield
Archive Producer
Beatrice Read
Music Supervisor
Gary Welch

Categories

Production Status

Production Company

Crawshay Films in association with Ventureland and Very Much So

Crawshay Films

Tim Mackenzie-Smith

Page updates

This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.

See also

You may also be interested in other relevant projects in the database.

A black and white archive image of Arnold Schwarzenegger smoking a cigar with a woman Erwin W. Wyrsch: The Photo Journalist

Director: Mark Forbes

Year: 2021

Erwin Wyrsch is a retired Swiss photo journalist from 1960's to 1990's where he met Peter Fonda, Billy Idol and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Erwin brought the idea of a Motorcycle Benefit event, based on the model of the American love ride, to Switzerland. He believes the art of taking a photo has been lost in the modern world. He spends his senior years restoring his convertible vintage Lotus in his friend's garage in Switzerland.

A woman paints on a large canvas in bright colours The End of Times

Director: Luca Anzalone

Year: 2026

Caught between her indigenous Buryat roots—where art is a shamanic window between worlds—and a Western market that treats culture as a commodity, artist Yuma Radne constructs a monumental canvas to confront the psychological distortions of colonization at the edge of an irreversible era. "Either you make art, or you suffer. It’s like a curse." For painter Yuma Radne, the act of creation is not an aesthetic choice, but an ancestral code carried in the blood. Moving from a remote Siberian village to the high-stakes European art world, Yuma finds herself navigating a surreal landscape where sacred cultural identity is rapidly converted into a luxury product. Through intimate studio dialogues and raw philosophical reflections, the film captures the gruelling physical and mental labour behind her graduation masterpiece, The End of Times. Centred around a gargantuan erupting booze (a traditional Buryat dumpling) mutated into an absurd, monumental symbol of a colonised and erased national identity, the film transcends a typical artist portrait. It becomes a vital, cosmic meditation on why humanity continues to create art in the face of systemic collapse—and a powerful testament to an indigenous culture refusing to be reduced to a souvenir.

A lady with white hair sat in a chair talking with a customer surrounded by fabrics Tobias and the Angel

Director: Mark Forbes

Year: 2021

Tobias & The Angel are famous for their shop in West London where all the different aspects of what they do that are combined to make it feel like home. The shop is owned and run by Angel Hughes and has a story to tell about her family beginnings.