LAND AND FREEDOM British Film Showcase

Land and Freedom is a wonderful, dismayed epic, and the finest film that Englishman Ken Loach
has made, a movie worthy of George Orwell and Homage to Cataloma. A young Communist from
Liverpool goes off to Spain on his own to join the revolutionary militia. He sees battle- captured
with brilliant, nervy exactness-as well as the chaotic arguments about how the new world must be
run. He falls in love with a Spanish woman; but then he witnesses the fragmentation of the
Republican forces and their betrayal by Stalin. Loach has always been of the left, but he has no
doubts here about how the totalitarians of the left betrayed Spain. The modern framework to the
story can be questioned, but the scenes from the 1930s are close to flawless. Seldom has wellintentioned
muddle been so beautifully portrayed.-David Thomson, Los Angeles Magazine
Land and Freedom has been selected as David Thomson’s Critic’s Choice.