Mick Jagger, Julien Temple and Carlos Acosta working on BBC film series in Cuba...

The BBC’s Creative Director Alan Yentob is working with Mick Jagger, the film director Julien Temple and ballet dancer Carlos Acosta on a series of films about the new Cuba.
Only weeks after the Caribbean nation re-opened relations with the United States, Yentob told The Independent that Temple was currently with Jagger in the Cuban capital Havana working on a “long-term project” to create the latest in a series of city-based films for the flagship BBC1 arts show Imagine. Previous films have featured London and Rio de Janeiro.
The Imagine host said he hoped to capture the story of a potential Rolling Stones concert in Havana, which could provide the finale for the band’s South American tour next spring. “We have started filming and this is going to be a project which will have a theatrical life (cinema release),” he said. Yentob, who is old friends with Jagger, also worked with Temple on Requiem for Detroit, a remarkable BBC2 film exploring the cultural and economic story of one of America’s greatest industrial cities.

The BBC Creative Director is making a separate film with Acosta as the dancer realises a long-held ambition of putting together a new ballet company drawn primarily from his native Cuba. “This is his last season at the Royal Opera House and he’s setting up his own company. It’s also his story about his life in Cuba and his family,” Yentob promised.
A new series of Imagine begins later this month with a film set in Venice, where Yentob and the author and Independent columnist Howard Jacobson examine the impact of one of Shakespeare’s most contentious characters, Shylock, the Jewish money-lender from The Merchant of Venice. The pair visit the city’s ancient Jewish quarter, Il Ghetto Nuovo, and discuss with Shakespearean academics the influence of Shylock on anti-Semitism. Jacobson’s re-imagining of the character is the subject of his forthcoming book, Shylock is My Name.

Temple and Yentob have combined again in the new Imagine series to make The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson, tracing the former Dr Feelgood guitarist’s battle with cancer and recent improvement in health. Temple previously made the acclaimed Dr Feelgood documentary Oil City Confidential and the new Imagine film was to be the story of the charismatic Wilko’s final days. Yentob said: “We started when he was going to die and then he got this redemption and discovered he was not going to die. It’s an amazing film.”
In a further adventure in music documentary, to be shown next month, Yentob has shot Who is David Gilmour? in which the Pink Floyd singer and guitarist explains the process of making his last album, Rattle That Lock, with his wife Polly Samson, the novelist and lyricist. “He does these scat verses and she put earphones on and walks across the beach and writes the words,” he said.
The new series includes a documentary on David Chipperfield – “he’s Angela Merkel’s favourite architect” – and the sculptor Sir Antony Gormley as he prepares for his momentous exhibition at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence.

 http://www.independent.co.uk