Most contemporary movies avoid politics like the plague. Land and Freedom triumphs as an intelligent and riveting political drama about the Spanish Civil War.
Ian Hart plays Dave, an unemployed communist in Liverpool who travels to Spain in 1936 to serve in the Republican Militia against the fascists under Franco. He falls in love with a fiery idealist (Rosana Pastor) who serves in his unit. The drama effectively captures the struggle for power between the militia, the anarchists, and the communists.
Land and Freedom follows in the train of Braveheart in depicting the high cost of the Holy Grail of freedom. English director Ken Leach has made an unusual film that reverences those intangibles which give meaning to life.