Rose Betts picks 4 movies to pair with ‘There Is No Ship’
In Pairings, artists and creators pick the movies that complement their latest work.
Rose Betts is an English folk pop singer-songwriter best known for her hit songs “Driving Myself Home” and “Irish Eyes”. Her cover of “Song to the Siren” appeared on the soundtrack to Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and her sophomore album There Is No Ship released in March 2025.
We asked Rose to pick a few movies that pair well with There Is No Ship.
Elvira Madigan (1967)
I must have been about sixteen when I first watched Bo Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan, a Swedish film that follows a soldier and a circus performer who run off together and spend a blissful but ultimately devastating summer in the woods and fields on the run. It is not heavy on dialogue or even plot but it is drenched in atmosphere. So romantic and tangible, I felt I could feel the dappled sunlight and taste the berries they picked from the bushes. I’ve always loved folk songs like “Scarborough Fair” and the countless incredible story songs from Ireland that take you through an event blow by blow, usually with a bitter end. I’ve had golden days that felt like they could never end, romances that burned bright and brief, and I’ve always loved the taste of those days gone by. My song “Alderidge Creek” was written under a willow tree and was inspired by the bittersweet love story songs I’ve heard and loved for so long. Irish music has a nostalgia and a fullness to it—all the layers of the different instruments and melodies are enough to bathe in, even though the group of musicians playing the music can be small. Irish music penetrates the soul, regardless of culture, and for me that’s a quality this film has. It is so gorgeously romantic and heartbreakingly sad, and you never want it to end. I longed to bring this quality into There Is No Ship, and I like to hope that it’s in there somewhere.
Juno (2007)
There’s so much I love about the film Juno and I chose it for a few reasons. I love the way it handles its subject matter. Teenage pregnancy is a life-changing and serious event, and it’s taken seriously in the film, but there is a lightness of touch throughout, expressed through the humour of the characters and their oddities that I just love. I always love to play with that in songs, to have a song sound musically very upbeat but then to offset it with lyrics that can surprise you with their subject matter. It creates so much room for playfulness, and also I think captures the oddness of life’s ups and downs. In the film, Juno’s dad, when he finds out about her pregnancy, says: “Well, that’s one doodle that can’t be undid”. The line always stuck with me. I just liked the neatness of it, how it made light of but did not dismiss something so life-changing… even just the way it sounds is pleasant in the mouth. It’s where the idea for the use of the word “doodle” as something like a mistake came from for my song “Doodles”. The quality of sad/dark subject matter accompanying bright and cheerful melodies is very Irish to me, and I embraced it for other songs in the album too, like “You Never Looked Back” and “Come Away” and even “My Funeral Song”.
Three Colours: Blue (1993)
One of my favourite films, Blue from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy is so beautiful it feels like a poem. It’s a film about grief, which is such a layered experience—it is numbing, but also scorchingly painful. Sometimes it feels like drowning, sometimes like afternoon sun on your upturned face. Some songs drift in on blue waters, coming from loneliness and isolation, loss and that tussle with endings. My song “Take This Body Home” was written for my grandfather’s funeral, and it was a song I would never had written had my mother not asked me if I would. My Irish grandfather left many unfinished and broken pieces behind him, but writing this song opened up a space for me to sit with the mixed bag of what death brings. It is so many things, it often goes beyond defining. “I Am An Island” was written when I felt very alone in London, when I first moved there. It too lives in a wide open, blue space and in writing the song I surrendered to the feeling, and perhaps left a little of myself there. Somehow Blue manages to encapsulate all of this complexity with grief, without ever containing it. It flows through you like a song. Healing but also strangely overwhelming at times, full of mystery.
The Sound of Music (1965)
This might seem like a strange choice! The Sound of Music was one of the first films I watched and obviously it’s a complete classic. What I love about it when I think on it now is how spirited and gutsy the lead character is. She might not completely fit a feminist ideal these days, but her confidence and spunk as a character, as well as her musicality and brightness, were wonderful qualities in a female lead character to be exposed to as a young girl. I wanted this album to have confidence, to take up space, and I think my feeling that it is my right to do so goes back in some way to this film. Add to all this THE MUSIC!! Each song in this film is special. Some are playful, some romantic, some deeply transcendent and some empowering, and they all have space in the same world. The melodies from this film are embedded in me. I have no idea how or where they come through in my music but I’ve no doubt that they do.