Award-winning director Paul Wright (For Those in Peril) explores the complex connection to the British countryside with an archival remix drawn from more than 100 years of Britain on film. With a new score by Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp), Arcadia embarks on a visceral sensory journey through the seasons, exploring the beauty, brutality, magic and madness of our changing relationship with both the land and each other. This fresh new work crafted from the past is a folk horror wrapped in an archive film; get ready for a very strange trip indeed...
Paul Wright’s flickering montage is an absorbing odyssey through bucolic calm, bizarre eccentricity and what appears to be real-life horror paganism.
Peter Bradshaw — The Guardian
An exhilarating audio-visual journey
Sight & Sound
There is magic in this film.
Uncut
No story. No characters. No drama. No narrative. Just a free-form visual tone poem about the role of the land in the British national psyche. No, wait! Come back! Arcadia is great. It’s a bizarrely seductive film from the Bafta winner Paul Wright (he made the 2013 drowning drama For Those in Peril) that shuffles and layers a monstrous amount of archive footage, gathered under oblique chapter titles such as “Amnesia”, “Into the Wild” and “Folk” and accompanied by an evocative score from Adrian Utley of Portishead and Will Gregory of Goldfrapp. It’s a fever dream of British eccentricity.
Kevin Maher The Times
If the UK does leave the EU, Paul Wright’s beautifully bonkers film Arcadia (BBC4) should be used by Donald Tusk to show why we should never be allowed back in. What a shower of cheese-rolling, Morris-dancing, nude-prancing, crusty-raving, zebra-riding, dead poodle-grooming, fox-eviscerating, glue-sniffing, environment-despoiling, emotionally constipated, self-deluding, fisticuff-favouring, gothically perverted, crypto-druidical fruitcakes we are. Truly, any other failed state, even Turkey, would be a more wholesome candidate for admission.
Stuart Jeffries The Guardian
Subjects: Brexit, Film Studies, British History
Institutional Licensing Options
DVD with PPR: $349
Digital Site License: $449 $299 ON SALE NOW
Digital Site License + Public Performance Rights: $499 $399 ON SALE NOW
Year: 2018
Director: Paul Wright
Executive Producer: Mary Burke
Producer: John Archer
Co-Producers: Mark Atkin, Adrian Cooper
Executive Producers: Mark Bell, Mary Burke, Clara Glynn, Ross McKenzie
Music; Adrian Utley, Will Gregory
Archive footage courtesy of:
BFI National Archive
Other archives:
Arte France
BBC
BBC Motion Gallery
British Tourist Authority
Channel 4, Screen Ocean
Garland Films Internet Archive
ITV London’s Screen Archive
London Film School
Media Archive for Central England
National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales North
East Film Archive
Northern Ireland Screen
Pond 5
Renown
Salvation Films
Screen Archive South East
South West Film and Television Archive
Steel Windows Association
STV
The National Archives
The Moon and the Sledgehammer Films
University of East Anglia and East Anglian Film Archive
Wessex Film and Sound Archive
Yorkshire Film Archive