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28 December
This is a Festival response to Long Forgotten Fields (2015) (which was directed by Jon Stanford, and premiered at Raindance Film Festival 2016)
Featuring what is insightful understanding in, and in showing, whatever is happening to² Sam (Tom Campion), all of it is at the centre of Long Forgotten Fields (2015), but without its being or seeming to be ‘about that', since there are many other connected themes that question the meaning of notions of strength, trust, duty, and loyalty, and how we describe them both to ourselves and to others when we invoked them.
We are put us straight into the woodland, and then, through his sister, into Sam’s time at home on leave : an embeddedness, in the setting in Shropshire, acts as a tension with what is and becomes reality for Sam, and into which Lily [Rebecca Birch] finds herself entering, and thus becomes – at various levels – complicit...
Very positively meant, perhaps a little as if Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden (in As You Like It) actually turns out a far worse place than being in the life of a provincial French court, and subject to its ways¹ ? :
And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.
Duke Senior ~ As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1
End-notes :
¹ Le Beau ~ As You Like It, Act I, Scene 2.
² Diagnostic labels, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or schizophrenia, rarely add to the nature of such experience, or the acceptance - or other accommodation - of those who have or see it, because they are reductionist in nature.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
