by Clarke Fountain
synopsis
The renowned director of England's National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Peter Hall, produced and directed this unusual film, adapted from the book Akenfield, which summarizes a sociological study of village life in Suffolk. The amateur cast mostly play themselves or close facsimiles, and the work of generations of farming and rural people is revealed through their depictions of daily life and conversations. Everyday life in the 1970s alternates, through flashbacks, with the more strenuous but nearly identical lives of the players' forebears in Edwardian times.
