About Land and Freedom
Bookended by scenes of David’s granddaughter discovering his journals and momentoes in contemporary Liverpool, Land and Freedom unfolds in flashback, finally coming back to the present at David’s funeral when his granddaughter throws a red kerchief filled with Spanish earth on to Carr’s grave.
With a great, humanist screenplay from the late screenwriter, Jim Allen, Land and Freedom is the first of three films that Loach makes in the late 1990s which focus on issues of international socialism and divisions with in the left. It was a contender for the prestigious Palme d’Or and winner of the Ecumenical Prize at the Cannes Film Festival 1995, as well as winner of the European Best Film Award (1995). The film boasts a subtle, moving central performance from Ian Hart, as the working class boy from Manchester who finds himself mired in the increasingly compromised battle for Spain’s socialist future as the guerrilla fighters of POM find themselves pitted against both Stalin and Franco.
For me, this film is one of three key works about the Spanish Civil War. The others are Picasso’s Guernica and George Orwell’s 1938 memoir, Homage to Catalonia
Kino Klassika proudly presents Land and Freedom on a 35mm print, kindly loaned with the support of The Works. The screening will be introduced by the Guardian’s chief film critic, Peter Bradshaw. Kino Klassika is delighted to announce that Peter Bradshaw hosts a conversation with the double Palme d’Or winning film director, Ken Loach after the screening.
Ian Christie
Film Director
Ian Christie is Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the co-curator of our exhibition at GRAD Unexpected Eisenstein. He co-curated Eisenstein: His Life and Art (Oxford Museum of Modern Art/Hayward Gallery, 1988). Ian also co-edited Eisenstein Rediscovered (1993) and The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 (1988). He is the author of monographs on Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and Martin Scorsese.
