FluxEuropa - dark music and more

FluxEuropa has suspended active publication and no longer requires items for review. The site is, however, being maintained as an archive and you can still post to the Gigboard and order Amazon products which helps to subsidise its continuation.

home > films

LAND AND FREEDOM (1995)

Director: Ken Loach

Ian Hart, Rosana Pastor, Icíar Bollaín, Tom Gilroy, Marc Martínez, Frédéric Pierrot etc

Ken Loach's Land and Freedom is a very powerful film, which, on a human level, has all the dramatic ingredients of idealism, heroism, love, and sacrifice. On a political level it comes as close as any film is likely to come to tackling the problem of authoritarian tyranny within movements supposedly struggling for a more egalitarian society.

Loosely based on the experiences of George Orwell, it traces the fate of an English volunteer who joins the revolutionary-communist POUM militia during the Spanish Civil War. Allied to the anarchists, POUM is eventually suppressed by the Communist authoritarians and centralists who dominate the Republican cause. The total disillusionment of the POUM militants caused by this betrayal renders the opening and closing sequences (which indicate continuing political commitment) somewhat incongruous.

It is also significant that criticism of left-authoritarainism is directed almost solely at the influence of Stalin, when the real problem is much wider. The film also presents a highly romantic and sanitised view of war. The killings are clinical and nobody has a dirty shirt or shits their pants. Despite these shortcomings, the film is well worth seeing.

Rik - 23 November 1995