The Best of British Cinema: ‘God’s Own Country’ (2017)
Francis Lee’s unexpectedly tender gay romance is sorely under-seen
I initially saw God’s Own Country shortly after it originally came out, back in 2017. It’s weird to think that that was already seven years ago, something that kept coming to mind when I was questioning how I had forgotten so much of such a touching film. Seven years! No wonder a lot of it has left my memory.
My poor long term memory aside, God’s Own Country has certainly aged well in the last few years as queer cinema has become increasingly popular. In 2017, it was released just as queer cinema was becoming more accepted around the world and within the mainstream — this film was released with months of Moonlight winning Best Picture, after all, which remains (in my eyes) the exact moment that film culture shifted and fully embraced representations of queer characters on screen — queer cinema has, of course, been around for many years, but Moonlight’s best picture win solidified that queer stories were now acceptable to the general public as much as the history of white and straight cinema that has won Best Picture throughout the Oscars’ history. The plight of Moonlight’s Chiron was placed on the same pedestal, made as important as, the story of Forrest Gump (yuck) or Titanic. The road to that acceptance was a rough…
