Event
Sunset Song
Sunset Song is Terence Davies’ intimate epic of hope, tragedy and love at the dawning of the Great War.A young woman’s endurance against the hardships of rural Scottish life, based on the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, told with gritty poetic realism by Britain’s greatest living auteur.
The film takes place during the early years of the twentieth century, with the conflicts and choices a young woman experiences reflecting the struggle between tradition and change; a struggle that continues to resonate today. Set in a rural community, Sunset Song is driven by the young heroine Chris and her intense passion for life, for the unsettling Ewan and for the unforgiving land.
The First World War reaches out from afar, bringing the modern world to bear on the community in the harshest possible way, yet in a final moment of grace, Chris endures, now a woman of remarkable strength who is able to draw from the ancient land in looking to the future.
Sunset Song is at once epic in emotional scale and deeply romantic at its core, given power by Terence Davies’ unflinching poetic realism.
"The film pointedly contrasts the splendor of the Scottish landscape with the punishingly austere lives of the farmers who toil in the fields."
"A commanding lead performance by Agyness Deyn as Chris, a farm woman tested by extraordinary circumstances, overrides most concerns. "The land endures," the narrator says, and so does Chris, vividly."
"Every rustling leaf and rustling cornstalk, every drop of rain pounding on stone, every tear of tissue paper, is lovingly drawn out."
