Not In My Name/ 1787

Not In My Name/ 1787 from Alastair Cook on Vimeo.

The third in a series of twelve films by Alastair Cook for Kevin Williamson’s project, Not In My Name, with a commissioned soundtrack by composer Luca Nasciuti.

Not In My Name was performed at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, at the National Library of Scotland.

“Alastair Cook’s films are beautiful” – Joyce McMillan (The Scotsman)

Linked by a sequence of video narratives – especially created for this show by filmmaker Alastair Cook – Not In My Name is the live performance of the radical subversive poetry of Robert Burns, the dangerous stuff he couldn’t put his name to during his lifetime.

Without changing Burns text, Kevin Williamson (poet, iconoclast and founder of the legendary Rebel Inc publishing house) will attempt to perform the poetry as he believes Burns may have done if he was around today. Alastair’s short films provide both context and chronological narrative to the performed verse.

From the vicious political satire Address of Beelzebub through little-known underground, republican, anti-war, patriotic and revolutionary classics to the famed anthem of humanity, A Man’s A Man, this is Scotland’s Bard as never heard before.