Sunset Song (2015)

Drama

Director: Terence Davies
Writers: Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Terence Davies
Starring: Ken Blackburn, Mark Bonnar, Stuart Bowman, Emily-Jane Boyle

"An epic story of love, loss and the land that inspired it all."

Sunset Song is Terence Davies's 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

Plot summary from IMDb: Spanning the 1910 decade, six years in the life of a girl named Chris, one of the numerous children of a tyrannical Scottish farmer. Years of high hopes and of disillusionment, of mirth and sorrow, of dreaming and toiling, of sweetness and violence, of love and hate, of peace and war. And in the end, the dignified loneliness of a new Chris, a woman who seems to have gone through several lives, now and forever as one with the land, the earth eternal...

Awards: 2 wins & 12 nominations.
Runtime: 135 min
R