Movies - Land and Freedom

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Land and Freedom

	Movies - Land and Freedom

Land and Freedom is a 1995 film directed by Ken Loach and written by Jim Allen. The movie narrates the story of David Carr, an unemployed worker and member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who decides to fight for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The movie won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize and the Cannes Ecumenical Jury Prize.

Synopsis

The film's narrative unfolds in a long flashback. David Carr has died at an old age and his granddaughter discovers old letters, newspapers and other documents in his room: what we see in the film is what she imagines.

Persuaded of the necessity of helping the Spanish Republicans in their fight against the fascist Nationalist insurgence, Carr, a young unemployed worker and member of the Communist Party, leaves Liverpool and travels to Spain to join the International Brigades. He crosses the Catalonian border and casually ends up enlisted in a POUM militia commanded by Lawrence, in the Aragon front. In this company, as in all POUM militias, men and women — such as the young and enthusiastic Maite — fight together. In the following weeks and months he becomes friends with other foreign volunteers, like the French Bernard, and he falls in love with Blanca, a member of POUM, who is also the ideologue of his group.

After being wounded and healing in a hospital in Barcelona, he finally joins — in accordance with his original plan and against the opinion of Blanca — the government-backed International Brigades, and he witnesses first-hand the Stalinist propaganda and repression against POUM members and anarchists; he then returns to his old company, only to see them rounded up by a government unit requiring their surrender: in a brief clash Blanca is killed. After her funeral he returns to Great Britain with a red neckerchief full of Spanish earth.

Finally the film comes back to the present, and we see Carr's funeral, in which his grandaughter throws the Spanish earth into his grave after speaking lines from a poem by William Morris.

Starring

Ian Hart
- David Carr
Rosana Pastor - Blanca
Frederic Pierrot - Bernard
Tom Gilroy - Lawrence
Iciar Bollain - Maite

Themes

According to Ken Loach, the most important scene of the film is the debate in an assembly of a village successfully liberated by the militia. People from the actual village where the film was shot play peasant parts in the movie and express their thoughts freely (despite language difficulties), and a debate ensues about whether or not to collectivise the village land and that of the recently shot priest. An American with the POUM militia argues that the war effort must come first, suggesting that collectivisation and other revolutionary actions might hamper that effort. He mentions that if such actions and the slogans accompanying them continue, they will not gain the support of the liberal democracies such as the United States and Britain ("You're scaring them," he says). The necessity of a contemporaneous war and revolution is expressed by a German militiaman, who says that 'in Germany revolution was postponed and now Hitler is in power'. In the end the villagers vote for collectivisation, thereby taking steps on a revolutionary path. In the anarchist-controlled areas this kind of expropriation of land was common, as the civil war was accompanied by a social revolution.

As in the above scene, both Spanish and English are spoken throughout the film, and subtitles are used selectively. Carr arrives in Spain without knowing any Spanish, but gradually picks it up — and luckily for him English is the lingua franca in his militia.

The social revolution was opposed by both the Soviet-supported communists and the democratic republicans and as the war progressed, the government and the communists were able to leverage their access to Soviet arms to restore government control over the war effort, both through diplomacy and force. An historical event, the bloody fight between Republicans and Anarchists for controlling the Telefónica building in Barcelona, has been chosen by Loach as an emblem of this internal conflict (See Barcelona May Days). Carr's progressive disenchantment starts from this meaningless fight, which he fails to understand because both groups were supposed to be on the same side. At one point he is guarding the Communist Party headquarters in Barcelona and engages in banter across the barricades with the anarchists opposite. He asks a Mancunian among them "Why aren't you over here with us?" In reply his compatriot asks him the same question and Carr answers "I don't know".

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Land and Freedom ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Land and Freedom; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay