‘Once upon a time in the heart of the British countryside, there lived a fair maiden who, try as she would, could not fit into the land around her.’ Drawing on 100 years of footage from the British Film Institute and the BBC, Paul Wright’s film starts with experimental time-lapse images of roots growing slowly under the earth and of flowers breaking into blossom in close-up, before moving across into more conventional images of church spires, ploughed fields, and bucolic village life.
There is a kind of idyll of past British life being evoked here, and the suspense felt by the viewer revolves around the question of how long the idyll will be sustained by the filmmaker before moving into darker and more troubled waters.
The different moods of the film (wonder, hope, horror, and decay) swing backward and forwards the whole time, yet the lyrical impulse remains throughout the film, even when the imagery turns violent. Crucial to the success of this powerful documentary is the evocative quality of the soundtrack, which veers between haunting folk songs and the sophisticated choral melodies provided by composers Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp).

(mlf, DokuArts)