LAND AND FREEDOM 199
dead in the pro cess. Blanca’s funeral in Spain morphs into Dave Carr’s funeral in
England almost 60 years later. His grand daughter eulogizes him with two lines
from William Morris’s 1885 poem, “The Day Is Coming”: “Come, join in the only
battle wherein no man can fail,/Where whoso fadeth and dieth, yet his deed shall
still prevail.”
Reception
After premiering in Spain on 7 April 1995, Land and Freedom was screened at the
50th Cannes Film Festival in May, where it won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury,
shared the FIPRESCI Prize with Theodoros Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze, and was
nominated for Palme d’Or. It also won France’s 1996 César Award for Best For-
eign Film. With distribution limited to art house cinemas, combined box office
gross receipts for Eu rope, North Amer i ca, and other markets was predictably modest
(about £7 million) but the film still made a decent profit, considering that its
production bud get was only £3 million ($4.47 million). Interestingly, Land and Free-
dom did its best business in France (in depoliticized Amer i ca, it ran in only 10
theaters and made a paltry $228,000). Reviews were almost universally positive—
some were adulatory. For example, film critic Philip French judged it “among the
finest films of the de cade” (French, 1995). Although she criticized the land- use
debate scene mid- film as bringing the movie’s narrative to a standstill, Caryn James
nonetheless praised Land and Freedom “as admirable and intelligent as any film
around” ( James, 1995, C23). German filmmaker Wim Wenders (whose com pany,
Road Movies, was one of the co- producers of a number of Loach films, including
Land and Freedom) confessed that he cried “his heart out” by the end of the movie
(Wenders, 2003).
Reel History Versus Real History
An inherently po liti cal war film, Land and Freedom rekindled the sorts of fierce par-
tisan debates over the conduct and meaning of the Spanish Civil War that raged
during the 1930s. Arguments flared over the movie’s implicit premise (which is
also George Orwell’s central premise in Homage to Catalonia): that Soviet commu-
nist influence hamstrung the International Brigades and fractured and debilitated
the Loyalist war effort overall, handing victory to Franco in the name of Stalinist
party discipline. John Dunlop, a British International Brigade volunteer from
May 1937 to December 1938, denounced Land and Freedom as historically inaccurate
in small and large ways. After taking issue with costume anachronisms (e.g., blue
jeans and Doc Martins) in the movie, Dunlop found fault with Dave Carr join-
ing the POUM on arrival in Spain: “By November 1936 all volunteers crossing the
frontier were [eventually] taken... to Albacete, where they were documented and
received into the International Brigades. So the naive depiction of how the young
Liverpool Communist Party member was persuaded by complete strangers to join
the POUM militia was a virtual impossibility.” Yet Dunlop’s assertion is contradicted
by George Orwell’s experience as a British anti- fascist volunteer who joined POUM
upon his arrival in Spain in December 1936. Modeled on Orwell’s story, Dave Carr’s
POUM affiliation is used as a plot device meant to provide him (and viewers)