The title says it all: beginning at the winter solstice in 2020, academic and film-maker Christopher Morris filmed a barley field in west Cornwall for one year. A field. That’s it. For 86 minutes this thoughtful, meditative documentary reveals the comings and goings: sunsets, sunrises, the midnight frolics of bunnies, the odd crisp packet blowing in. It’s unlikely to be storming a multiplex near you – though the opening scene does feature the close-up of a corpse. The unfortunate creature in question however is a field mouse that appears – limbs present and correct – to have expired from natural causes. The film’s paciest action scene is a three-minute-plus sequence of slugs slithering across lichen on a standing stone.
This eight-foot stone is more than 4,000 years old. “Carved by an alien civilisation – not from outer space, but outer time,” Morris says. “So long ago that who they were and what this means is lost to us with any certainty.” His voiceover has an elegant turn of phrase, finding poetry in the science of the moon slowly drifting away from Earth, or the complexity of the pale green lichen that makes its home on the ancient monolith.
Elsewhere, I felt ever so slightly hectored by the commentary on climate change. A discarded bit of Ann Summers packaging littering the field is the starting point for a sequence on the polluting fashion industry. As undoubtedly well-informed, considered and rightfully furious these points are, it’s a tone you may bristle at, with comments like this: “Our annual rhythms are no longer equinox, solstice and season. But want, take and more.” Though it’s hard to argue with his anger at people buying nylon knickers while the planet burns.
• A Year in a Field is released on 22 September in UK cinemas.
