In spite of its significance as a pivotal moment in English history, the English Civil War has provided source material for only very few feature films.
The best of these, by some distance, is this, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s meticulously researched and luminously shot film which focuses on the first English commune established in 1649 by Gerrard Winstanley in the unlikely location of St George’s Hill, Surrey.
Winstanley was the leading figure of the Diggers, a group who asserted their rights to cultivate the common land at the end of the War.
The filmmakers capture this formative moment in British socialism with a very precise and finely constructed filmic style that invokes Abel Gance and Carl Theodor Dreyer, visionary filmmakers whom Brownlow has championed in his role as a curator.
A restoration by the BFI National Archive.