LAND AND FREEDOM [SPANISH: TIERRA Y
LIBERTAD] (1995)
Synopsis
Land and Freedom (Tierra y libertad) is a film directed by Ken Loach and written by
Jim Allen. It follows the story of David Carr (played by Ian Hart), a member of the
Communist Party of Great Britain who travels to Spain to fight for the Republican
side in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1938). Joining a co ali tion of socialists, com-
munists, and anarchists waging a losing strug gle against Francisco Franco’s fascist
forces, Carr experiences po liti cal disillusionment as factions of the Left battle each
other as well as the enemy.
Background
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, conservative pundits in the Western
democracies interpreted its demise as incontrovertible proof that capitalism was
the only viable way to or ga nize modern socie ties. As he recalled in a 1995 inter-
view for the World Socialist Website (Allen, 1995), Jim Allen (British film director
Ken Loach’s longtime screenwriter) found this view highly disingenuous: “With
the fall of Stalinism, the coming down of the Berlin Wall, the West said, ‘That’s it.
Communism doesn’t work. It’s finished!’ And the likes of Tony Blair and com pany
jumped on the band wagon. ‘The God has failed. Go back to your factories, your
dole queues and forget it. It’s the free market economy that works.’ We wanted to
show that communism and socialism never existed in the Soviet Union, that Sta-
lin was a monster.” After coming across a pamphlet by the International Brigades
Committee in Manchester, Jim Allen persuaded Ken Loach that a Spanish Civil
War film would be the most effective vehicle for debunking the myth of Stalinist
Rus sia as a “communist” state. Over the next four years, while fundraising (from
British, German, French, and Spanish sources) was in pro gress, Allen went to Spain
to interview dozens of former members of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unifi-
cación Marxista [the anti- Stalinist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification]), read
every thing he could find on the war, and frequently debated and developed ideas
with Loach (Anonymous, Teachers Notes, Film Education, n.d.). The script that
fi nally emerged was based on a number of books: Mary Low and Juan Brea’s Red
Spanish Notebook (1937), Felix Morrow’s Revolution and Counter- Revolution in Spain
(1938), Abel Paz’s The People Armed (1976), Victor Alba and Stephen Schwartz’s
Spanish Marxism Versus Soviet Communism: A History of the P.O.U.M. (1988), and
Burnett Bolloten’s The Spanish Civil War (1991), but George Orwell’s Homage to Cat-
alonia (1938) was the most crucial and closely followed source.