REVIEW: SEPARADO!
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AS singer with Welsh psychedelic pop/rock heroes Super Furry Animals, the prolific Gruff Rhys has pulled some pretty leftfield stunts in his time - arriving at Glastonbury in a "raved up" army tank and releasing a hit single with 49 mentions of the f-word among them.
But the pan-continental road trip from Wales to Argentina to trace his family roots, tour his latest solo album and track down long-lost 1970s pop star uncle in SEPARADO! (TBC) might take just the biscuit.
What starts as a surreal mishmash of re-enacted fatal horse races and Welsh Bollywood dance sequences soon evolves into something far more absorbing, if no less frivolously pursued.
The ever-likable Rhys traces the ends of a bitter family feud and explores the small but significant migration of his poverty-stricken countrymen to Patagonia to escape English oppression in the 1800s.
As he zaps from country to country, he clocks up some off-the-wall collaborations with local musicians and several off-piste, lo-fi gigs.
Audiences vary from confused pensioners in rural Patagonia to "a disinterested horse" in the Andes.
Separado! is a strange-but-true history lesson in how a colonial mountain enclave in South America came to grow daffodils and speak fluent Welsh, lovingly bought to the screen with Rhys' own wry humour and fantastic, folky songwriting. - MATT HUMPHREYS
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