A Year in a Field (12A)

★★★ "The title says it all: beginning at the winter solstice in 2020, academic and film-maker Christopher Morris filmed a barley field in west Cornwall for one year. A field. That’s it. For 86 minutes this thoughtful, meditative documentary reveals the comings and goings: sunsets, sunrises, the midnight frolics of bunnies, the odd crisp packet blowing in." ~ The Guardian.

An ancient monolith stands sentinel in a Cornish field for millennia. Part provocation, part meditation, part invocation, BAFTA-winning documentarian Christopher Morris’s film is a record of their brief interaction. 

Morris invites us to slow down, as he films for a year in a West Cornwall field; to immerse ourselves in this quiet, direct-action of stillness, to take a breath and reflect on the planetary impacts of our brief human existence, under the watchful gaze of the Longstone, a 4,000-year-old standing stone that predominates this elemental landscape. 

From Winter Solstice 2020 to Winter Solstice 2021, a string of unprecedented worldwide climate disasters, met by weak global political resolve, are revealed as just fleeting moments, under the ever-present unflinching granite gaze of the Longstone. 

As the wheel of the year turns, Morris’s ecosophical polemic unearths a mythic reality buried just below the furrowed soil of our consumerist age, suggesting, perhaps, that whilst time may feel like it’s running away at an ever-increasing rate, it’s not too late to pause, reflect, and change.