Tending the Farm
A turning point in British social realism?
It’s a Thursday night at the British Film Institute in London. An audience of eager, well-heeled, mostly middle-aged cineastes has arrived to the premiere of a highly anticipated new British film. A woman in a plush plum coloured coat and pink vintage kitten heels pulls BFI member’s tickets out of her handbag and thrusts them in the general direction of the usher. She chatters away to the man standing beside her — pushing 60 and emitting an air of pomposity, his moustache twirls into two distinct ringlets that hover either side of his mouth. “They’re calling it the British Brokeback Mountain,” he bellows as she nods along in fervour, clasping at his arm. They shuffle into the screening a few feet behind me.
The BFI’s Thames-side bar and adjacent screening room could hardly be more different from the milieu conjured up in the film itself — we’re here for the London preview of God’s Own Country — a quiet tale of two young farmers falling for one another against the expansive backdrop of the Yorkshire moors.
Two suited businessmen sit a few rows to my left, the elder of the pair physically recoiling as the film opens onto a scene of a young man bent double, retching over a dirty toilet bowl. Directed by Francis Lee, this breath-taking debut tells the story of Johnny, the twenty-something son of an ailing sheep farmer who expects little from the hand he’s been dealt. That is, until the arrival of Romanian farmhand Gheorghe breathes new life into his routine.
Over the past year, Great Britain’s farmyards and acres of rolling hills have set the backdrop for a new movement in contemporary British cinema. Just as flooded Somerset provided ground for Hope Dickson Leach’s 2016 breakout The Levelling, the enigmatic Pennines provide similar context for Francis Lee in this impressive debut feature. Alongside Clio Barnard’s upcoming Yorkshire-set Dark River, this cross section of independent films are a rare breed of new social-realist dramas that abandon the trope of inner city playground for isolated farmland.
I take my seat towards the front of the screening room, and hear the moustachioed man’s distinctive bellow filtering down through the theatre as the couple make their way towards my row. “It’s supposed to be about Brexit,” he booms, “migrant workers and the like.” I feel that sinking feeling you get after you’ve heard someone complain unreasonably to a ticket officer and then they’re seated next to you on the train. The pair settles into seats either side of me, and I offer to swap so they can sit together. They chatter incessantly until the lights dim and I stare at my lap, tuning them out to focus on the program in my hand.
On the page, which by this point my negligent neighbour has splattered with merlot, is printed a cast list and a Sight and Sound article by renowned film critic Trevor Johnston for the September 2017 issue. “The notion that God’s Own Country is, in a way, a summation of a life’s journey indicates why it comes over as an uncommonly mature debut,” he writes, passion propelling itself off the page.
And an uncommonly mature debut this most certainly is. As the lights come up and the director shuffles onto stage for a post-screening Q&A, his audience quietens, still reeling from the vulnerability and stark emotion he so effortlessly conjured to life before them. Lee giggles through a thick Yorkshire accent as an audience member raises their hand to ask whether this piece is autobiographical.
As fledgling British filmmakers move towards examining life in rural regions in complex, uncompromising terms, they press us with questions about the realities of life in Britain today. How might these stories might have the power to illuminate the complexities of city life as we know it, and what does this emerging ‘rare breed’ tell us when placed in the context of its social realist forebears? I’m looking to find out more about why these stories are being told — and more importantly, why now. I hope to determine what role stories that are part-documentary and part-life can hope to play in 2018’s post-truth, post-Brexit Britain.
I. God’s Own Country
Francis Lee rings me half an hour late for our interview from the same moor on which his film takes place. The Yorkshire Pennines provide, not only the backdrop for this tale of love and vulnerability, but also the backdrop for his own childhood. His voice is higher in pitch than you might expect on first sight of his bushy grey beard and short stature. An actor turned director, who once played small parts in Heartbeat, Casualty and Midsomer Murders, Lee apologises profusely for his lateness with a giggle, the tone of his voice even lighter and more playful than he had sounded through a microphone at the packed Q&A earlier that month. I’m overwhelmed by his interest in the piece — he regurgitates phrases from our week-old email correspondence, pausing thoughtfully between questions to consider the weight behind each chosen word.
I ask why he felt compelled to tell a story which relies so heavily upon a landscape that, in film, is so often limited to binary representations (as either idyllic and bucolic or exceptionally bleak). “The reason I made this film, which is the reason I come back to time and time again,” he explains, “is that I am from here and my dad farms sheep here, and I have never seen this region depicted in the way in which I lived it.”
Lee explained that it was crucial to him that audiences from outside the region (particularly city-dwelling audiences, which will make up the majority of the film’s viewership) understand the duality of the place he calls home. “As much as I see it [Yorkshire] as being creative and expansive and fascinating, it’s also in equal measures, difficult, problematic, brutal and isolating.” It’s this dichotomy that builds the foundation for his story — landscape informs narrative, and vice versa. “I guess this film was about exploring in more of an academic or theoretical sense how you marry those two opposing ideas.”
God’s Own Country opens on scenes of rolling hills before dawn, the sound of retching echoing as twenty-something famer and protagonist Johnny (Josh O’Connor) promptly regurgitates the countless beers he consumed the night before. We meet him as he brutishly picks up a boy at a café and has his way with him in a horsebox. After the deed’s done, the boy asks if “we can go for a drink sometime”, and Johnny looks on with a sort of measured incredulity. “There’s no we,” he clarifies, abruptly. In just two lines of masterful scriptwriting Lee establishes Johnny as seen through the eyes of his nearest and dearest — scorned, brash and above all else, bitter.
Struggling to balance the weight of his impending inheritance alone, with an angry father too ill to tend the land and a grandmother unable to bridge the gap between the two male figures in her house, Jonny takes to abusing a combination of rough sex and rough drinking to lessen the burden. Cue the timely arrival of Georghe (Alec Secareanu), a devastatingly handsome Romanian migrant worker that Johnny’s grandmother has taken on as hired help.
Georghe knows his way around a farm and silently works alongside Johnny to prepare for lambing season, a sort of calm and gentility washing over the screen each and every time he enters a room. By the time Georghe’s forced a trade in (Johnny’s rough sexual advances for something more tender) the edges of both characters have begun to soften. Just as the lambs are birthed, so Johnny begins his new life — one in which he’s vulnerable to a tenderness he has, up until this point, reserved only for livestock.
For every way in which the subject matter of God’s Own Country touches on issues that are both current and politicised (LGBT rights, British attitudes towards immigration, and the complexities of rural land economy), the film is, for the most part, intimate and overwhelmingly personal. For Lee, it’s an outstanding debut because it has thus far resonated with a wide audience that lack his personal connection to the rural landscape that it so authentically portrays.
I express to Lee my fascination with the cyclical structure of God’s Own Country’s narrative, and how it manages to harken back to the more traditional stylistic elements of British social realism while offering it’s audience a new kind of ending; one that’s both unresolved and hopeful all at once. On a farm, he explains, “the cycle of life is present on a day-to-day basis. It becomes a practical thing — birth life and death happen cyclically and that’s how you make your living. Not just in terms of if you produce animals for the food market, but if you have any kind of livestock you are going to have dead stock, and your life is governed by that. The money you make is governed by that. […] These are people who care deeply for their animals and I loved that mirror between what was going on at the farm, that lifecycle, and Jonny’s emotions — how those two arcs mirrored one another.”
The social realist canon has often served as a vehicle for exploring the changing and complex aspects of masculinity, with specific focus on the angry young male protagonist. Business as usual, Educating Rita and Rita, Sue and Bob Too all feature male protagonists that are powerless and often domesticated. In Mike Leigh’s 90’s work, we see a uniting anger and misogyny in the trope of “working class hero”– a response to the masculinity crisis brought about by fast-changing economic and social roles. In some of the more up-tempo films of the genre that surfaced in the 90s (The Full Monty, Brassed Off, or Up’n Under), filmmakers search out a more utopian solution to this crisis — one founded in male bonding and community action.
In God’s Own Country, Johnny’s anger at the world is eased, not by mediating the complex relationship he has with his father, or by finding refuse in male communal activity (as tradition might dictate) but rather, by allowing himself a vulnerability and softness, reserved for his relationship with Georghe. Not only is this a film about growth and acceptance, on a more simplistic level, it’s a film about the immense bravery it takes to make yourself vulnerable. I asked Lee why he chose this as the focus, rather than placing the emphasis on a more traditional ‘coming out’ narrative. “In my experience and in other people’s experience I knew, coming out wasn’t the main event. People I knew weren’t defined by that moment or their sexuality,” he explained. “The hardest thing I’d ever had to do was fall in love. Learn how to accept love, and give love and embrace intimacy.”
The film’s commercial successes came as somewhat of a surprise for Lee, additional screenings opening up and down the country with critics and audiences alike hailing it one of the “greatest films of the year,” and “the strongest British debut since Ramsay’s Ratcatcher.” I ask whether Lee thinks there’s a reason that we’re seeing more and more independent films telling intimate, rural stories doing so well at the box office this year.
“I wanted to explore this bloody landscape and the idea of falling in love, so I wrote God’s Own Country. I’m very obsessed and compelled, and this was the only thing that was in my head,” he implores — this film was a labour of love, and audiences connecting with it internationally feels, to Lee, like a bonus. “From what I’m reading, the tweets I’m seeing, people are first and foremost struck by the romance — by the depiction of love and hope. All the points that people have picked up are being viewed from a very personal perspective. I guess God’s Own Country is, in that sense, a microcosm of the macrocosm.”
His intent was never to create a microcosm of the political macrocosm, however — the timely nature of writing a Romanian migrant worker into the script wasn’t part of a grand plan to align his work with a pro-immigration worldview. “I wasn’t thinking about where it fitted into the world or what people would think of it, I just wanted to be truthful to my world. I would like to think that any well-made film with engaging characters audiences would gravitate towards, but the success of this film has caught me unaware. Writing this, I was blinkered… uncalculated.”
Lee succeeds in developing the realist genre while simultaneously both subverting and advancing it. The twirly moustached man’s empty comparisons by the wayside, this is not Britain’s Brokeback Mountain at all — far from it. This intimate rural tale is much more potent, and, in its timely distribution, has something more potent to say. God’s Own Country is a film that only Lee could have made, and a film that he felt compelled to make to offer an authentic, complex portrayal of the place he grew up and the life he knew there. As such, it combines expert narrative focus, patient craftsmanship and slow-burning yet heavy emotional payoff.
From a soundscape built from layers of recorded woodland birds to actors taught how to birth lambs (Lee forbade any and all use of hand doubles), authenticity was the primary practical focus during the making of God’s Own Country. I ask whether this will continue in the stories he tells in future.
“I think there will always be a sense of rigour in my work,” he remarks, as our conversation draws to a close — he has to get back to his writing. “I love rigour. I love making sure that my work is truthful, whether that is in an emotional or a practical sense. Truth to me is everything. That’s me naturally, and that will continue.”
II. Tradition
In a classroom full of young teens, a child stands hunched over an old-fashioned wooden writing desk. “There’s always somebody, isn’t there,” his teacher sighs, exasperatedly, “somebody who wants to be awkward. Somebody that just won’t be interested, no matter what you do — just like you, Caspar.”
A classmate pipes up, “he’s got this hawk sir, and he’s mad over it. He never knocks about with anybody else, just goes with the hawk all the time. He’s crackers over it.” The child shoots a look of mixed hurt and indignation in the direction of his classmate and shouts back, “Better than thee, any road.”
To grow up British is to grow up with Caspar and his pet Kestrel in Ken Loach’s 1969 classic Kes, a landmark of social realist cinema and one of this nation’s most prized depictions of ‘ordinary’ life. More than any other genre, social realism remains deeply intertwined with British cultural identity and history, charged with the crucial role of thrusting the experiences of ‘real’ Britons to the fore.
First growing out of the documentary movement that flourished in the 1920’s, British directors that pioneered the movement are renowned for their treatment of issues such as poverty, race and class in the UK’s divided society. These touchstones of British cinema rarely paint a ‘pretty picture’ — rather, they are political statements and artistic renderings of a country struggling against complex issues of class inequality and racial tension. While, traditionally, social realist films share a critical tone, they are also some of our most moving and poignant love-letters to Britain and the lives its people lead.
In the years following World War I, it became clear that the working class favoured big-budget Hollywood films, which meant that realism bled primarily through the veins of the upper class, aligning itself with high education and a moneyed viewership. Today, although Loach’s I, Daniel Blake proved a notable hit in 2016 (and the biggest domestic opening of Loach’s career) and travelled far beyond London’s arthouses, the same still cannot be said of the overwhelming majority of films in its tradition. Often subject to limited release, the social realist audience tends to be those educated cineastes that live lives furthest from the ones these films depict.
The British New Wave, one of the major phases of social realism in the UK, binds together a number of films made by young British directors over the course of the 50s and 60s. Such films as Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life make up this part of the movement and mark a distinctive shift in how the working class were represented on screen. Their protagonists were no longer stock types, but fully rounded individuals dealing with complex issues of culture, freedom, restraint and modernity. When these seemingly dreary, kitchen-sink dramas failed to achieve financial success, a large number of their directors relocated to Hollywood or moved into the medium of television in the late 60s.
After the establishment of Thatcher’s government in 1979, the very fabric of the UK politics began to change. The UK saw a major power shift — heavy industry declined and the service industry grew, changing the economic map of the UK once and for all. Social realist works of the 1980s are often referred to as ‘state of the nation films,’ pushing the boundaries one step further to examine the crisis of masculinity in a state of economic depression.
The 90s saw the decade of Cool Britannia — in which the UK rebranded itself to focus on theatre arts, fashion design and youth culture. Trainspotting, The Full Monty and Billy Elliot are all instruments of this revamped national image that new labour pursued. The 90s saw more complex explorations of issues of masculinity — some of these films going as far as to express a discomfort with (or violence towards) female characters (Brassed Off, Nil by Mouth). Or, in the cases of films like Trainspotting or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a lack of female characters and a refocus on the heterosexual, homosocial world of men.
By 1999, journalist Vanessa Thorpe had observed a trend that began to emerge at the Cannes Film Festival — a ‘new renaissance’ for social realism and one which saw fledgling British filmmakers (aside from celebrated Loach and Leigh, think Lynne Ramsay, Gary Oldman and Shane Meadows) borrowing directly from the British New Wave’s distinctive style of the late 50s and early 60s. While a new generation appeared to take up arms in Loach’s battle against the Hollywood machine, she wondered whether the re-emergence of social realism in the 90s was symptomatic of a lack of imagination on the part of young Brits — a laziness masquerading under the guise of authenticity.
Some still continue to celebrate British social realism’s myriad successes through gritted teeth. Its downbeat stories are sometimes perceived to be unwanted or burdensome for the marginalised folk whose real lives they’re fictionalising — or one a step further, an insult to the escapist spirit of cinema itself. It’s this sentiment that causes some of its most prolific contributing directors to distrust the very notion of realism as ‘genre’ — “it’s a way for critics to isolate the work,” Loach once complained to the Financial Times.
Above all else, however, the term social realism is most commonly used to discuss those films that promise to ‘show us to ourselves,’ elevating and dramatising those stories so rarely deemed worthy of the big screen.
III. A New Wave
In 2015, film journalist Brogan Morris penned an open letter to Shane Meadows, pleading with him to return to filmmaking. In it, he expresses a concern that the UK as we know it, with its “working poor, demonised other and crippling wealth cuts” lacks the “compassionate voices” of contemporary British filmmakers ready to tell the stories of the working class that are more necessary now than ever before.
It’s safe to say that the notion of social realism as the sole blunt, leftist political instrument of Ken Loach and his contemporaries is out-modish and in desperate need of an update to encompass the new wave of realism we’re seeing emerge in the British independent film industry today. In answer to Morris, directors like Hope Dickson Leach, Francis Lee, Esther May Campbell and Clio Barnard are here to take up the mantel that Meadows abandoned for television — they’re telling the stories of rural British communities that we’ve never seen on screen before — at least not like this.
There is a scene in Andrea Arnold’s 2009 debut Fish Tank in which teen protagonist Mia leaves her council estate flat to the distant clang of noughties hit single ‘Me and You’, by Cassie. She crosses the estate to linger near a pack of young girls, all sporting low riding tracksuit bottoms and tight pink lycra stretched over belly button piercings. They dance provocatively in the street, taking turns to gyrate in the middle of the circle to the beat.
Mia pauses for a moment to watch them dance, and is promptly asked “what the fuck she’s looking at, skanky little pikey.” Shiny gold hoops swing from earlobes as the girls tussle, screaming curse words and throwing slaps. One of the pack comes away with a bloody nose, the other a sharp shove to the chest. “Walk away, cunt, walk away,” they scream, as Mia walks briskly on, alone. As she walks, she sees a lone horse tied up in a parking lot. It’s white and covered in mud, and it turns its head to watch her at her as she walks towards it.
The juxtaposition of the natural world with the inner city is a thread that runs through social realist cinema (from Kes to Fish Tank to Arnold’s 2003 short Wasp). These films see young, angry inner-city dwelling protagonists allowing small elements of the natural world slip into their own. The rural realism that has developed over the past two years moves the lens away from the inner-city altogether, marking the emergence of a new focus — on tending, living off the land and rearing livestock.
Rural realism tends, in it’s own way, to precipitate a major shift in focus, from the politics of the social and public to the politics of the private and personal. The genre places emphasis on the children of the working class, particularly in the context of them struggling against the burdensome inheritance of their parent’s livelihood — the family farm.
While the realism of the 90s tended to focus primarily on young, male protagonists with women serving mainly as agents of consumption, the later half of the decade saw a blurring begin to take place between ‘traditionally male’ and ‘traditionally female’ domestic spaces. Films in the new rural realist canon all share thematic concerns in how they treat masculinity, isolation, inheritance and the familial dynamics of the British working poor, borrowing from and simultaneously subverting the tropes of early social realism and marking a significant turning point in the way in which we experience the British countryside on film.
IV. The Levelling
Hope Dickson Leach explores, with a quiet confidence so rare in a directorial debut, the complexities of gender, responsibility and personhood in The Levelling. The film opens on Clover (played masterfully by Ellie Kendrick), who has been away from her family’s Somerset farm training to be a veterinarian, as she is informed of the death of her younger brother, Harry. Upon arriving at the farm, which has been devastated by the preceding year’s floods, she discovers that Harry shot himself after an evening of revelry. Clover’s vice is her father, repressed traditionalist Aubrey (David Troughton). He had planned for Clover to take on the farm, but in what he deems a selfish turn, she left, and the responsibility fell to her younger, less stable, brother.
This mournful, atmospheric debut is what you might refer to as a prime example of unadorned, simplistic filmmaking. I say this not to detract from its merit — far from it — but to emphasise the pure and quiet brilliance of a tale told well, with no frills attached. The narrative Dickson Leach draws us through is once again cyclical; in essence the film’s story begins with an end.
“Where were you? We needed you here,” Clover’s father asks on the day of his son’s funeral, marking the beginning of a conversation that drives to the very core of the film’s raw power, sketching a father-daughter dynamic marred by deep-seated and inexpressible resentments. “I know,” she replies, her eyes glazing over with tears.
“You knew how soft he was,” her father rages, “you knew he couldn’t cope, you don’t wait for him to ask. He shouldn’t have to call you. For Christ’s sake, I trusted him. I gave him the farm and he promised me he could cope,” he breaks down in tears and relives the final conversation he shared with his son before he took his own life. “You knuckle down and you deal with it, I told him. This is your farm now, this is your life. You bloody better get on with it.”
In the broader context of global cinema in the last two years, we’ve seen countless examples of filmmakers attempting to explore what it means to be a ‘modern man’ (think Moonlight, King Cobra or Park). In a time of such significant social change, and because so many of the historical constructions of our society are fundamentally patriarchal, when those structures are loosened or disturbed, our conceptions of masculinity are subject to upheaval.
Just as Lee explores the notion of modern masculinity through a man’s struggle with his own sexuality, in The Levelling, Dickson Leach succeeds in exploring the fickle, stoic masculinity of generations gone by. She reminds us that, despite countless advances, this out-dated self-restraint and repression still persist (particularly in the rural pockets of our country), and reminds us how much work is still to be done to abolish the stigma surrounding men’s mental health.
In conversation with Hope Dickson Leach, I press the question of rural stories on the big screen — why does she think that these lesser-told British tales are beginning to be explored now? “These stories have been told for as long as there have been stories, however I think audiences are now responding to stories featuring characters and settings they don’t see normally on the screen. Certainly, as an audience member, I’m always hungry for difference,” she explains. “We’re experiencing a bit of a renaissance at the moment with three British independent films set on farms coming out this year,” she observes, “as well as previous works like The Goob and Norfolk.”
“Rural isolation is useful for raising the stakes when they are psychological and, for the most part, internal,” Dickson Leach explains. Protagonist Clover thinks she’s escaped the suffocation of the farm that shaped her, but she ends the film condemned to return to her old life. Her father, who had hoped to pass on his farm to his children, watches isolated as his livelihood is devastated by the floods, and his children are driven away.
“Isolation forces these two characters to come together, as well as being one of the reasons for Harry’s death and Aubrey’s own form of survival. I think being away from city conveniences, and forced to tend the land, makes the relationship with the land integral to the isolation — and thus to the psychological consequences. Isolation allowed me to use the landscape to tell the story of these characters.”
Films in the rural realist tradition share similar, sparse soundscapes, each using natural sound in layers to exaggerate the feeling of immersion in the worlds they build. Dickson Leach explained that for her, the score needed to serve the role of subtext “in a film where the characters aren’t emotionally articulate.”
Similarly, Francis Lee spent a vast portion of our interview explaining in intricate detail the way in which he combined, layered and manipulated natural sound to build a Greek chorus of birdsong, lamb bleats and door creeks that were truthful to both the interior and exterior spaces he was shooting in. “I wanted it to feel as immersive as possible,” he explained, “like you were there. You could smell it, you could breathe it and you could most definitely hear it.” Dickson Leach explained that her score, “needed to be emotionally complex, and provide insight into what these characters were experiencing, but not provide answers or easy solutions.” In transporting us into these worlds, the rural realists force us to experience their hilltops and farmyards as real space, rather than distant and imagined cinematic topographies.
As an exploration of the hardships and personal complexities of lives governed by livestock farming, The Levelling is both authentic and specific, reinforcing the notion that there are vital, dramatic and truthful stories yet to be told about the challenges facing England’s often invisible rural communities. Just as the focus in Francis Lee’s world is telling his own story authentically, Dickson Leach explains that the authenticity of The Levelling was crucial in relaying the stories of those who had suffered the reality of life on the Levels.
“I thought that if you pay attention to making a space authentic, the story will become believable, relatable and universal for audiences,” she says. “I wanted to do service to the real people who went through the floods on the Levels and who shared their stories with me.”
V. The Shepherd
The British social realist tradition has, since its inception, been intertwined with (and heavily influenced by) European cinema. The link between the British and European New Waves can be traced back to a brief exhibition of short documentary films during the “Free Cinema” movement in London in the mid to late 50s when a European strand of the exhibition was introduced, in which young directors like Truffaut, Lenica, Borowczyk and Polanski were exhibited. In the 90s, we saw further development in the relationship between British and European realism in both production and distribution.
Similarly, the new wave of rural realists is not an exclusively British phenomenon. What strikes me on first viewing of God’s Own Country is its likeness to another film I saw this year that explored isolated, rural life and continued to rattle around in my head long after it had ended. El Pastor is an independent Spanish film, both quiet and completely overwhelming. In its opening sequence, sheep move fluidly across the screen in great waves, filling the frame as the bells hanging from their necks clang quietly. The score, not unlike Dickson Leach’s sparse soundtrack or Lee’s lovingly constructed soundscape, chimes low and steady overhead.
A stirring tale of a shepherd’s struggle to maintain his home in the face of brutal capitalist forces, El Pastor is part rural drama, part social critique and part homage to the brutalist landscapes of central Spain. In it, we watch Anselmo (the tale’s titular character) struggling with local property developers against offers of cash in exchange for his land. It’s not just a simple tale of good versus bad, though — as focus slowly shifts onto the developers themselves, we see them struggle against demons of their own, transporting the film into the realms of thoughtful meditation on the destructive, oppressive nature of modern capitalism.
Director Jonathan Cenzual Burley succeeds in injecting drama and complex moral considerations into simple shots and uncomplicated stories. Just as God’s Own Country forces our gaze in the direction of something larger than the tale of love and vulnerability it tells, so does El Pastor force careful consideration of the nuances of rural Spain’s socio-political climate.
I spoke to the British-born filmmaker about his work, the complexities of rural storytelling and reasons behind our hunger for authentic stories in the context of 2017’s turbulent political climate.
“It was extremely important to retain a level of authenticity,” Burley explained when asked about his fascination with filming in a semi-documentary style.“That’s why the first 10 minutes of the film are so important, the audience needs to, in a way, fall in love with the lifestyle of the shepherd, or at least to understand it, to sympathise with it, because that’s what he’s about to lose.”
We discuss the depiction of power in the film — how realist filmmaking tends to draw from the current political sphere and explore power dynamics in a more aesthetic, conceptual manner — I ask whether the parallels critics are drawing between the film and Trump’s election are valid. “I think it feels timely because there is always somebody in power who abuses it, there is always a bully kicking around,” he explains. “In this case it just happens to be the biggest bully we’ve seen in a very long time.”
“I drew a lot of inspiration from the Spanish writer Miguel Delibes,” Burley says, when I ask how he managed to balance tension, drama and what is obviously a deep and enduring respect for the rural community he portrays. “Delibes was not only a genius at describing rural life in Spain during the dictatorship, but also managed to convey great social criticism while keeping the tense atmosphere all the way through. He didn’t rely on twists, he simply let you know that something bad was going to happen, and even though you knew when it was coming, it was still incredibly shocking.”
We discuss the trope of male antihero which has, thematically, both so much in common with and provides such contrast to the young, repressed protagonists of The Levelling, God’s Own Country and Dark River. “I drew inspiration from films that deal with antiheroes, where the landscape seems to shape them. For example, Winters Bone, No Country for Old Men, Blue Ruin and Drive,” remarks Burley.
Indeed, the dichotomy Burley presents in his film (beauty and brutality) is not unfamiliar in the rural realist canon. Is this duality something that Burley aims to address in future work? I wonder whether he has ever explored inner-city life, and whether he plans to keep working in this style in future. “I know I will be filming in rural areas again as I am attracted to the visuality of them, much more than inner city landscapes, although I find it extremely atmospheric when they both join (like a neon illuminated gas station in the middle of nowhere), maybe it’s based on the whole ‘opposites attract’ idea — they seem to work extremely well together, and to convey a strange mixture of emotions — beauty and melancholy.”
“I don’t intend to stick to an authentic, realist style of storytelling, I just tell whatever story happens to be in my mind. My first two films, although shot in the countryside, were much more surreal, so I never really know what style I will do next. I find that it is something intuitive, not something I purposely go out to create, but it can’t be denied that there are similarities in all my works. In the editing and cinematography, and the subject matter, regardless of genre, [my work] always seems to deal with lonely, isolated people. I don’t know why, it’s just the stories that appear in my mind.”
In the wake of Brexit, the UK’s film industry faces the unknown. Will our prized tradition of European co-productions (including recent social realist success I, Daniel Blake) continue? How will we adapt to losing the luxury of avoiding, for example, France’s international film quota?
International talent (actors directors and production workers specialising in a variety of areas such as visual effects) relocating to the EU means facing the very real threat of a disastrous skills shortage here at home. In acknowledging European cinema’s crucial and continued contributions to the realist cinema celebrated in the UK, it is fascinating to consider this trend in relation to its European influences and counterparts, and place these British films in context amongst the broader European reaches of documentary style fiction.
I ask Burley why he believes that both British and Spanish audiences are becoming more and more fascinated with rural stories during a time at which both nations face unprecedented political turbulence and unpredictable futures (particularly relevant in light of Spain’s recent Catalan referendum). “I think people migrate to whatever makes them feel safe and also to whatever gives them strength,” he replies.
“In the case of the kind of rural stories we’re discussing, maybe it’s because they ground us and keep us connected to reality. At the same time, there is a huge rise in popularity of superhero films — maybe because they help people to disconnect, to evade the issues at hand. I suppose it comes down to whatever helps you get through the day.”
VII. Context
What’s crucial about films like God’s Own Country, Dark River or The Levelling is that they draw focus to the relatively large and struggling portion of the population in the UK who are living in rural settings (that’s currently 19% of Britons). Just as these communities are in danger of being overlooked in terms of their representation on screen, they’re in danger of being overlooked when it comes to poverty and deprivation and ill-health, warns a report from Public Health England. With an aging rural population (23.5% of those in rural communities over 65 compared to 16.3% in urban areas) we are in grave danger of isolating a huge cross-section of British life which already has less access to the internet and health services and more people living in poverty and facing severe hardship.
Britain’s decision to leave the EU has brought about uncertainty in almost every area of our economy, but few are feeling as rightfully fearful as our country’s farmers. Last June, the countryside voted leave overwhelmingly, and only months later did the consequences of that decision begin to come to light. A poll by Farmer’s Weekly two months before last year’s referendum suggested that 58% of farmers backed Brexit, though the National Farmer’s Union argues that the survey was misleading and that the split amongst farmers was actually about 60:40 in favour of remain. The biggest surprise, though, was that any farmer voted to leave at all.
In no uncertain terms, Brexit simultaneously reemphasises and fuels our country’s north-south divide. In yet another study released this year, it was estimated that Brexit would have nearly twice the impact on the economy of the north of England as on London. Northern regions are more dependent on trade with the EU than the south, with roughly 10.2% of the North’s GDP dependent upon the EU, compared to just 7.2% in London. Similarly, more than 40% of all northern jobs are in occupations at high risk of being taken over by automation.
The farming industry as we know it faces two immeasurable challenges at present — the risk of an unfavourable agricultural policy and rapid advances in robotics. Combine these, and we’re hurtling high-speed towards change that disrupts this industry for good. Director of external affairs at the country land and business association recently told the Financial Times that “there is a stoicism in farming, and this is a sector that is used to going through tough times. There is a growing feeling in the community that we are entering uncharted waters.”
This statement is poignant — particularly in the context of a nation waiting to understand how the choice it has made will affect its livelihood for the foreseeable future. In pushing rural stories to the fore, we force focus upon the isolation, separation and fragmentation that are the root cause of this country’s divided national identity. Simultaneously, we force ourselves to inspect more closely the pockets of British life that face the most potential for change in the coming years.
VI. Water Salad on Monday
I realise I’ve forgotten to ask Hope Dickson Leach one final question on my list, and shoot her over a quick email to follow up. Whose work resonates with you at present? Who do you consider to offer an authentic vision of rural Britain? “I am a huge fan of EMC’s body of work,” she comes back within minutes. “New exhibition upcoming. Fascinating.”
A born and bred city-dweller with my distant roots planted in various pockets of the Yorkshire dales, I can count on one hand the times that I’ve roamed around a working farm, despite my new and extensive familiarity with films shot on them. In an attempt to broaden my survey of the rural realist trend emerging, I travelled to Bristol on a particularly cold day in November. My destination was Water Salad on Monday — a photographic exhibition by prolific filmmaker Esther May Campbell. She had, in a shift away from her usual cinematic output, stationed herself on a farm for a year, producing an arresting, emotionally charged photographic exhibition of her observations there.
In discussing the nature of purported authenticity with Francis Lee, he emphasised time and time again the roots of his obsession with ‘telling the truth’. “I was an extremely obsessive stills photographer, so my aim at the heart of it all is to tell a story that feels real and engaging and that people will simply need to see,” he explained. The boundaries between documentary and narrative blur in each of the films I investigated (Burley mentioned that his project began as a documentary and adopted a rough narrative structure somewhere along the line), and it therefore seems apt to examine the work of a filmmaker who has moved to the more conventionally ‘truthful’ medium of stills to explore the nuances of rural life.
Curated as an immersive tour of the farm itself, Campbell has pasted her work in large scale onto tree trunks, in amongst the haystacks in the barn, and over the roof of a pigpen. I meander around the site feeling oddly overdressed, my newly polished black leather boots unprepared to withstand the rotten apples which collapse unceremoniously beneath my toes as I make my way across the orchard.
Samantha Lay, the British academic responsible for the only current ‘survey’ of British social realism available (From Documentary to Brit Grit) uses her penultimate chapter to argue that, in light of de-industrialisation, deregulation and privatisation, social realist texts of the 21st century tend to explore working class lives not in terms of what they produce, but what they consume. Rural realism might then be considered, in the context of this prediction, a marked and considerable turn away from this capitalist push. The farming industry, as depicted in this collection of films, is indeed part of a larger, more systemic agent of consumption (in that the goal is to farm livestock for produce) but simultaneously on a more personal, cinematic level, a space governed by care and a connection to the land. In the photographs dotted around the farm, this duality is clear.
Beyond the innovation of the work, the subject of the exhibition is itself unique — the farm combines the work of volunteers, carers and adults with learning disabilities. A colourful section of countryside spliced into central Bristol, the farm is managed by Brandon Trust, a charity specialising in care farming — the “therapeutic use of farming practices to provide health and social care for individuals with additional needs.” The adults I met at the farm were both carers and those with learning disabilities and autism, all happy to go about their day as though this pesky photography exhibition was merely part of the (very muddy) furnishings. Far from the loneliness and isolation of Lee, Dickson Leach and Burley’s conjured environments, this depiction of rural life radiates pure community and togetherness.
I read a recent interview with Esther May Campbell in which she’d said that, “tending, it seems to me now, is a way of being with the alarming times we are in.” I turned the phrase three times over in my head, not quite able to put my finger on the thought she was trying to convey, but equally positive that she was absolutely right.
Campbell agreed to an interview one week-day evening over Skype, and I can’t help but blurt her own quote back at her as soon as our conversation begins. I ask her to elaborate and she smiles kindly, pausing to think before expanding.
“It feels to me like we are hurtling towards something… because of the ecological and environmental shitstorm that’s coming (which is a byproduct of capitalism, a byproduct of civilization and a byproduct of what you might call human separation). This kind of human experiment which has been going on for a long time which is to do with us dominating the land, separating ourselves, saying: I’m here, you’re there.” She pauses to push her dark glasses frames slightly further up her nose. “Showing passion for animals, showing emotion, is a rather radical step in a society that doesn’t do much to acknowledge tenderers.”
I explain that this grand notion of emotional and physical isolation (or, as she deems it, separation) is a theme that runs through each of the films I’m examining. She nods along as I try to articulate why I’m so fascinated by the dichotomy of separation and unity that seems to dominate this genre. “Tending enables us, as humans, to connect to something other than those greater capitalist pushes and pulls that seem almost impossible to get away from,” she explains, calmly.
We talk community and isolation, and how the ebbs and flows of capitalism are drawing us further and further away from the land that we live off. “The opposite of tending the land might be, say, social media” she explains. “The idea [social media fosters] is that you’re with yet very much separate. You’re being liked, being seen — but you hold all these values that are opposite from someone setting in the earth and helping a turnip to grow. Tending involves slowing down, it involves quietness, it can involve communality or total isolation, and these are all things that seem quite radical in today’s world.”
The man that met me as I entered the exhibition was pushing a wheelbarrow, and happily walked me over to a portrait tucked around a shed nearby. I spent five minutes looking at it before I realized that he was its subject. Campbell’s show is unique because it requires you to engage. It requires you to collaborate, to commit yourself and, in its lack of distinctive structure (and lack of signposting) it requires you to immerse yourself in the lives of those it portrays. “I didn’t know what it should be like, which was kind of nice in a way,” Campbell explains, when I ask her to tell me more about how she came up with the idea for the show. “I’m self taught, I hadn’t done anything like stills — I had a small show in a friend’s front room, which was tiny, and not conceived, that was probably the beginning of giving me some confidence. I’m almost fucking with the edges of what stills can be and how they interact with moving image.”
Campbell’s a BAFTA award-winning filmmaker — why turn to stills to tell this particular rural story? “The subject informs the form, so you find something and you think — how can I tell the story? When I started to go to Elm Tree Farm it was never going to be a film project, it was going to be a stills photography project, and part of that was going back to what I said about the tones of tending – they include slowing down, quietness, communality — these are things that are often hard to find in filmmaking.”
The conversation flows on to other things, and Campbell suddenly interjects, as though a thought has run swiftly through her mind and she’s afraid she might forget to say it out loud. “For the first time on the radio this morning,” she blurts out, “there was a man talking about the religion of capitalism and economics, and how economists talk about what’s good for the economy here, and what’s good for the economy there, and that there’s an assumption that we inherently believe that what’s good for the economy is what’s good for us — for our insides and our outsides. He warned that we have to be incredibly careful with that assumption. To hear somebody say that on mainstream radio… I think that the cracks are beginning to show, I kind of hope they are.”
I could talk to Campbell for hours, listening to her theories about modernity and philosophy while I hang from every word, her face lit only by the dim fluorescent light of her computer screen — but once again, my hour draws quickly to an end. Why now? Is it about truth? Is it about telling stories we haven’t heard before? I think it’s a bit of both. She takes another long pause, her tone measured. “Perhaps now people are telling stories about rural life because there is an ideological sea change, or the stories that we want to tell, if we set them in an urban environment, are restrictive to a certain dogma. When people feel traumatized, they look to the countryside, and I think people are questioning everything right now.”
VIII. Dark River
The final leg of my journey brings me to my least favourite Odeon, tucked behind a corner in London’s overflowing Leicester Square. I shuffle through tourists to pick up my tickets for the European premiere of Dark River, innovative British filmmaker Clio Barnard’s third feature. Not set for release until February of 2018 and the highly anticipated successor to docu-drama The Arbor and later The Selfish Giant, Dark River tells the tale of two adult siblings that struggle to share between them the weight of their turbulent childhood.
Upon receiving the news of her father’s passing, protagonist Alice (Ruth Wilson) returns to the family farm in north Yorkshire for the first time in 15 years to find that her brother has driven both himself and the land to ruin during the years he spent caring for their father (Sean Bean) before his death.
As Alice’s past is revealed gradually and through flashbacks, the audience comes to understand the lifetime of sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, with the tacit support of her brother, Joe (Aiden McCullough). The siblings are forced to reopen old wounds when Alice revels the real reason for her return — she intends to apply to become the farm’s sole tenant.
“There’s a desperation in them to connect with each other — they’re carrying a burden that doesn’t belong to them,” Barnard explains, discussing the relationship between the film’s central siblings before presenting her film to the packed theatre at the BFI’s London Film Festival 2017. “By the end of the film they manage to find one another.”
Just as the landscape and the act of tending serves to unite Jonny and Georghe or Clover and Aubrey, in God’s Own Country and The Levelling respectively, so it serves to unite Barnard’s central duo, both struggling viciously against gender expectations, the weight of their inheritance and years of suppressed trauma.
Barnard discussed the complex relationship between her work and the notion of ‘truth’ in conversation with critic Jonathan Romney back in 2014. “When I was very young I watched a film that had a profound effect on me — that was Rashomon,” she explains, referencing Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece, in which four characters provide contradictory accounts of the same violent incident. “That idea that the truth is unstable has been a strong influence ever since. I suppose that, in terms of documentary, there’s an expectation that somehow it’s going to tell the truth or deliver the truth — and clearly, that’s problematic.”
Aside from an unnecessarily contrived final ‘twist’, Wilson and Stanley deliver incredible central performances, and Dark River sees Barnard reaffirm her status as one of the most important directors working in Britain today. Just as Dickson Leach remarked of The Levelling, physical and emotional isolation up the anti in what is ultimately a brutal tale of sin, redemption and forgiveness.
Dark River understands its own complicated relationship with truth and the lines we carve between fiction and the real world we inhabit. After all, there is no such thing as ‘reality’ in cinema. Realism is a narrative style, just like any other, and will never have any higher moral value or hold upon the truth than any other form of storytelling. What happens is fact, and ‘truth’ is simply how we, as storytellers, choose to mediate it.
What each of these rural tales strives to do, by grounding their audience firmly in the realms of the natural world, is to present us with personal arcs and exteriors which are authentic. In the fast-paced, capitalist world in which we now live, these depictions of uncompromising authenticity and tenderness on screen are nothing short of radical.
IX.
“We are not chasing the news,” said Luc Dardenne during an interview with the Financial Times last year. Half of the celebrated realist Belgian filmmaking duo behind Two Days One Night and the primary influence cited by both Dickson Leach and Lee, Dardenne elaborates. “We just feel characters should live in the real world. Even if sometimes cinema has to remind people where the real world is.”
That’s what the rural realists are doing in Britain today. They’re reminding us where the “real” world is — or perhaps more pertinently, they’re reminding us of the expansive and varied lives lead by the people of this country, especially those men and women who we all too often forget to frame as our romantic leads or feminine heroes. They help find a place on screen for people more often seen as statistics.
We watch a younger generation (Johnny, Clementine and Alice) struggle against the traditionalism, stoicism and dissatisfaction of their parents, as each film shines a modern spotlight on the plight of the working poor and decline of industry in rural regions.
As director Sean Baker said in a recent interview, “if you’re a filmmaker in the 21st century, it’s hard not to be a social activist.” The rural realists are not making political films in a conventional sense. Their politics lie instead with who they make their films about — our country’s forgotten working poor, the disenfranchised and the young. This small collection of films serve the purpose of what Francis Lee deems the “microcosm of the macrocosm,” shedding light on larger issues through dramatic, intimate and personal narratives.
There existed a shift in the realism of the 1990s, in which British filmmakers attempted to find their identity in the global market context by adapting, adopting or paying homage to American cinema, rather than placing themselves itself in opposition to it. The strand of social realism we see emerging now is unequivocally much more than the “crutch” that Thorpe warned against in 1999, or the auteur-like, style-focused individuated product that troubled Samantha Lay.
Indeed, instead of harkening back to the gritty, overtly stylised films of the nineties, God’s Own Country, The Levelling and Dark River share one final trait — they each play openly into their love of the hopeful Hollywood ending. If anything, this new wave of British rural realism proves the opposite of scholarly predictions for the future of social realist cinema in Britain. Led by a flock of wronged, flawed and misunderstood children, these characters redeem themselves, time and time again, opting for love over fear and community over isolation.
A great writer said that, in dark times, the definition of “good art” is that it “locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness”. Perhaps what elevates this new wave of rural realist dramas is just that — an ability to draw the audience’s eye to those small, dimly lit pockets of our fragmented country that glow despite our times’ inherent harshness.
As I end my conversation with Esther May Campbell, I remember my favourite photograph that hung at Elm Tree Farm — one which showed a newborn piglet suckling from its mother’s teat as the sow lay sprawled across a mountain of hay. I ask offhandedly how Campbell dealt with the cycle of life and death being brought so starkly to the fore on the farm.
“It was just there, death. It’s a leveler, isn’t it. Just as the weather is, as the seasons are, they level us all. We’ve all been born and we will all die — the same wind will hit us all when we’re together in roughly the same landscape. The seasons will change around us. Whatever our social status or desires, there’s this leveler that’s around us all the time. Maybe that’s what we’re all interested in when it comes to rural storytelling.”
“Things that unite us rather than divide us?” I ask and she pauses to think.
“Yeah,” she nods slowly in agreement, “the things that unite us.” She pushes her thick frames slightly further up the bridge of her nose once more. “I think it’s about things that make our position in the world feel both powerful and extremely small all at once.”
