Winstanley

Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's second film - their first was the legendary It Happened Here - is set in Cromwellian England and deals with a disparate group of people, united in their disillusion, poverty and landlessness who create a commune and call themselves Diggers. Their leader is Gerrard Winstanley, a man with a utopian dream of social equality. Based on David Caute's novel Comrade Jacob, it fits into the world of 1960s agitprop, riding the anti-everything, drop-out tide of student protest, but Brownlow and Mollo are not firebrand radicals, much less flower-power hippies. They are, first and foremost, serious historians who shot the film for over a year, often in harsh conditions. As a period reconstruction it has few equals - with the possible exception of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.