Land and Freedom

Tierra y Libertad

Director: Ken Loach
Year: 1995
Country: Spain
Running time: 109 mins
Spain/UK/Germany
Producer: Rebecca O'Brien
Screenplay: Jim Allen
Photography: Barry Ackroyd
Editor: Jonathan Morris
Music: George Fenton
In English and Spanish with English subtitles
Stereo

With:
Ian Hart
Rosana Pastor
Iciar Bollain
Tom Gilroy
Marc Martinez
Frédéric Pierrot

Festivals: Cannes, Toronto, New York, 1995
Boldly departing from his usual English, working-class terrain (Raining Stones, Ladybird Ladybird) Ken Loach proves more than equal to his epic subject, the Spanish Civil War. His dramatic account of the great lost war against fascism is powerful, intelligent and bracingly partisan. Actor-to-watch Ian Hart goes from Lennon (The Hours and Times, Backbeat) to Lenin as an idealistic young communist who leaves unemployment in Liverpool and joins the anti-fascist Republican forces, only to discover that his Stalinist allies pose an equal threat to his ideals - and his life. Few British films fare so well in Europe as this. Land and Freedom won the French Academy Award for Best Film, took the International Critics Award at Cannes, and most tellingly, filled Spanish cinemas for months.

"The film pulsates with fierce exhilaration and anger that feed off each other: exhilaration at a moment within living memory when everything mattered; anger that it could all be so callously extinguished in the name of expediency... the heart of the film isn't in its battle scenes, shot though they are with an immediacy and a lack of bombast that makes them feel wholly authentic. The key scene... a political debate over whether to collectivise the land in a newly-liberated village is sinewy, pungent and anything but dull... Land and freedom: in the film, as in its title, the two are inextricably linked." — Philip Kemp, Sight and Sound

"Loach involves the audience by showing how people's ideas change through their own experiences. This is the source of the tremendous emotional charge of his films. And it is why he is so subversive an artist." — Michael Eaude, New Statesman and Society