Arcadia

Director: Paul Wright

UK, 2017, 78', color, black & white

 

Arcadia is a provocative and poetic new film about our contradictory relationship with the land, crafted from archive footage. The BAFTA award-winning Scottish director Paul Wright has repurposed archive material to tell a provocative story for our times. Set to an original score by musicians Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp), Arcadia blends a mixture of film and TV footage from the BFI National Archive and regional archives around the UK, creating a powerful mosaic of images, sounds and moods, taking in folk carnivals and masked parades, hunting and harvesting, communes and raves, mechanisation, environmental destruction, fires, floods, storms. Arcadia reminds us what happens when our connection to nature, and each other, frays and unravels. By exploring and asking ourselves what we have gained and lost in the last century, perhaps we will discover something of what we’ll need to survive in the next.