Where You’re Meant to Be has all the ingredients of a documentary gem. A disagreement between oddballs and the backing of an organisation – The Scottish Documentary Institue – that allowed the life’s unpredictable grain to seep into the film as it was made. Scotch indeed.

It doesn’t matter that a central tennet of the film doesn’t quite hold: the tension between stalwart folk legend Sheila Stewart, and ragtag rocker Aidan Moffat. Aidan wants to adapt and rewrite songs to fit a modern urban context. Sheila thinks tradition should be honoured.

Except she doesn’t – she admits to addings words here and there. She is just annoyed that Aidan has obliterated a deeply moving metaphor. Sheila Stewart explains to Aidan Moffat, playful, zesty (playing the role of an) underacheiver that

Our ship lies at anchor, she is ready to dock
I wish her safe landing without any shock
And if ever I should meet you by land or by sea
I will always remember your kindness to me

is a metaphor about death and carriage to heaven. Aidan had thought it was about getting home drunk from a taxi rank and rewrote it. So we can be free to adapt old folk songs, just not to bulldoze them. Credit to Aidan, when he learns the meaning of the verse, he takes it and continues to peform the original to this day. I thought of Dangerous Minds, when Michelle Pfeifer taught us, the playful, zesty underachievers in the classroom, that Bob Dylan’s Tambourine Man was a drug dealer.

With great editing, the film refuses to take a side. (The debate is meaningless anyway) but in depicting two artists’ mutual appreciation for each other, making space for each other’s creativity, the film shines.

So here’s a health to the company and one to my lass
Let’s drink and be merry all out of one glass
Let’s drink and be merry, all grief to refrain
For we may or might never all meet here again

In the spirit of humour and inventive filmmaking, here’s a 10 minute documentary from 2006, funded by the SDI’s Bridging the Gap scheme, which has nothing else to do with the review: