Bel Review: Finishing the Album, Living With the Absence

Leah McAleer gathers with people who loved her sister to listen to an album its singer will never hear. Among them is the musician Kathryn Joseph; filling the living room is the voice of Beldina Odenyo, the Kenyan-Scottish artist who performed as Heir of the Cursed and died by suicide in November 2021, aged 31. Louise Lockwood’s documentary, Bel, allows this listening to retain its strange intimacy. They can hear the familiar turns of her voice. They cannot interrupt her, ask a question, receive an answer.

Elsewhere, microphones surround an amplifier playing Odenyo’s recorded guitar. Preparing her unfinished music for release involves giving it the acoustics of a room, a physical situation that the original recording can inhabit again. McAleer understands the impossible wish accompanying this practical work. She speaks of trying to bring her sister back, yet continues with the task she can complete: finishing the album. Lockwood gives this labor room beside the testimony of loss, letting us encounter grief as a succession of things someone gets up and does, even while knowing what none of them can accomplish.

Odenyo had stored her recordings in a folder called “passable demos,” a description the music repeatedly outruns. Her voice descends into a dark, rounded register and rises into a tremulous, keening brightness, with guitar playing whose intricacy can coexist with considerable spareness. There is pleasure in hearing how much expression she finds across that distance. The recordings retain the intimacy of work made at home, and the film’s inclusion of informal musical footage keeps us near the process of making something, before an audience has decided what the finished object means.

Her teenage video diaries contain another imagined audience. Speaking from her bedroom, she anticipates future admirers, announces her musical ambitions, laughs at the prospect of dazzling people. These passages give the archive an unruly forward motion. Here is someone making plans, trying out a public self, enjoying her own nerve. We arrive burdened with knowledge she does not have, and Lockwood’s preservation of her humor allows a little resistance to that burden. Her laughter deserves to be heard without being searched for the sadness supposedly concealed beneath it.

That freedom becomes painful when McAleer describes hearing apparent warnings in the songs and wondering why she did not listen differently. The recording stays the same; the listener returns changed, capable of discovering an accusation in a phrase that once meant something else. Lockwood makes space for this experience without establishing the sister’s guilt as fact. Odenyo’s concern about being remembered through other people’s words complicates the archive further. Her own speech and singing have substantial space here, though selecting, assembling, and releasing them necessarily places decisions in surviving hands. Love cannot remove that responsibility.

The film gives Odenyo’s suffering a history without making history a complete explanation. Taken from Kenya to rural Dumfriesshire as a young child, separated from her mother, she entered a family situation whose details remain fractured in the recollections. McAleer remembers a child who did not speak for days. Friends describe racist violence at school, including an attack in which she was set on fire. These accounts make the later language of artistic expression feel terribly inadequate: finding a voice was an achievement within a life where being visible had already exposed her to harm.

Her account of a mental health crisis brings that exposure into adulthood. A friend called for an ambulance; police arrived first. Odenyo describes being subjected to violence and a racist question about HIV. Lockwood includes this testimony within a portrait otherwise rich in people who recognized her intelligence and talent, and the proximity matters. Affection existed. So did encounters in which asking for help left her vulnerable to further injury. The film’s account of isolation during the pandemic, when she was living alone in Paisley and opportunities for live performance contracted, gives solitude a specific address and circumstance.

Onstage, she could determine something about the terms of an encounter. Poet Jackie Kay remembers Odenyo’s refusal to smile or ingratiate herself with an audience, a freedom Kay found empowering to witness in another Black Scottish woman. Odenyo’s authority resides partly in that refusal to soften herself for the room. Yet her discomfort with making pain commercially available introduces a pressure within the music itself. Expression could become an obligation to return to what hurt. The film holds this unease beside the evident power of her singing, allowing the work to remain valuable without assigning it the impossible task of keeping its maker alive.

Footage of her performance at the 2021 Scottish Album of the Year Awards at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall recurs across the film. Singing Joseph’s “The Bird,” Odenyo commands the stage with an intensity that makes the occasion’s promise understandable. Her death weeks later gives the returning footage an almost unbearable proximity to a future nobody in the room could yet know. I am wary of hearing every note through that future. There is a danger of making the performance disappear beneath its aftermath, of treating an accomplished act of interpretation as evidence in an inquiry it cannot resolve. Her phrasing still belongs to the song she is singing.

Lockwood eventually withdraws the voice. A sustained silence accompanies still images of Odenyo’s flat, her musical equipment, cables, glasses. The interruption changes how these things can be seen. Equipment that helped carry sound now sits without its user; glasses retain the shape of an everyday need. After so much access to a recorded person, the film lets ordinary belongings occupy the screen without asking them to speak for her. The silence is difficult to sit through because listening has become our means of approaching her, and that means has been taken away.

At Odenyo’s grave in Kenya, close to where her mother is buried, McAleer plays the album she has helped complete. She speaks of feeling that she let her sister down. Completing the work has given her something to bring here, while leaving that feeling unresolved. Lockwood does not hurry the encounter toward relief. The recording reaches this place through the effort of people who assembled it, and McAleer listens beside the grave, with the finished album and the guilt she still carries.

Bel premiered as the closing film of the Edinburgh International Film Festival on August 19, 2026, followed by its broadcast release on BBC Scotland, BBC Four, and BBC iPlayer in October 2026. Directed by Louise Lockwood, the poignant music documentary tells the story of the late Kenyan-Scottish singer-songwriter Beldina Odenyo (who performed as Heir of the Cursed), chronicling her sister Leah’s emotional journey to complete and release her unreleased album posthumously.

Full Credits

• Title: Bel

• Distributor: BBC Scotland, BBC Four, BBC iPlayer, Hopscotch Films

• Release date: August 19, 2026 (Edinburgh International Film Festival), October 4, 2026 (Television/BBC iPlayer)

• Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes (90 minutes)

• Director: Louise Lockwood

• Producers and Executive Producers: Sarah Howitt, John Archer, Nancy Bornat, Mark Thomas, Jackie Kay

• Cast: Beldina Odenyo, Leah McAleer, Kathryn Joseph, Jackie Kay, Hannah Lavery

• Composer: Beldina Odenyo