10 great British pastoral films

Taking place in a borderless, unnamed and untamed patch of farmland in Scotland, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest makes its Arcadian setting feel both familiar and strange. Its opening shots are of resident farmer Walter Thirsk (a dewy-eyed Caleb Landry Jones) in a sun-dappled wheatfield, going for a skinny-dip and stroking a butterfly before slathering his tongue over a lichen-crusted tree and chewing pensively on the bark. Adapted from Jim Crace’s novel of the same name, the film centres on a medieval village on the verge of having its odd old ways overturned, as the profiteering agenda of the industrial revolution seizes hold. 

Films set in the British countryside are often laced with nostalgia. But, despite the idyllic surroundings, a sense of trouble in paradise comes with the territory – as in many folk horror films. At times of war, dramas like The Lion Has Wings (1939) and A Canterbury Tale (1944) saw Albion’s decadently rolling hills become a patriotic emblem and a promise of better times ahead. By the mid-century, bucolic provinces were where uniquely British class divides became stark: in The Go-Between (1971) or TV’s Brideshead Revisited (1981), country estates are the playground of the rich but the slavish workplaces of the poor.

In recent years, the British pastoral film has had an unexpected revival. A new crop of features have focused on more marginalised working-class stories – The Levelling (2016), Andrea Arnold’s Bird (2024) and Tsangari’s atypical agricultural tale among them. As Harvest arrives on UK screens, we’ve chosen 10 films that showcase Britain’s green and pleasant land.

Director: Alberto Cavalcanti

A dozy middle-England village may now seem an unlikely stage for a German wartime coup, but Graham Greene’s source story for Went the Day Well?, ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’, capitalised on mounting fears among the general public that the countryside would become the target for an invasion. This yarn, about a band of apparently British troops descending upon the fictional village of Bramley End unannounced, starts out as a jolly comedy – as the undercover enemies betray their real identities with increasingly peculiar behaviour – but winds up startlingly grisly, with women struck down, threats to slaughter infants and a child being shot at.

As Bramley falls under German occupation, the plucky villagers desperately attempt to sound the alarm – or church-bells – covertly slipping notes to the postman or scribbling secret messages on eggs. Went the Day Well? was the second of a streak of propaganda films that the Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti made for Ealing Studios. The screenplay is also notably progressive, allowing its female characters to take up arms and join the fight.

Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

A delightfully odd modern companion to Chaucer’s chameleonic anthology, A Canterbury Tale was shot in the thick of World War II. Its rabbit warren of a plot sees soldiers become contemporary pilgrims en route to receive a blessing in Canterbury. Along the way, an American and a British soldier become waylaid in the fictitious stop-off of Chillingbourne, where the town’s women are being terrorised by the mysterious ‘glue man’. 

Part detective drama, part sylvan fable, part whimsical romance, Powell and Pressburger’s strange parable is knitted together with huge tenderness for the Kent countryside and its customs.

Director: John Schlesinger

Britain’s literary pastoral canon would not be complete without Thomas Hardy’s wry exposé of the true chaos of country life, revolving around the bold Bathsheba (here Julie Christie) and her three suitors (Terence Stamp, Peter Finch and Alan Bates). 

Whether John Schlesinger’s version did justice to the tome was disputed by critics, and the film was much-maligned on release. Off the back of two swinging 60s escapades, Billy Liar (1963) and Darling (1965), this adaptation seemed a huge change of pace for the director. And yet, the wind-rattled drama demonstrated a knack for striking visual compositions and arresting colours, which made the most of Dorset’s sweeping landscapes. Its scene showing off Stamp’s swordsmanship is hypnotic.

Director: Joseph Losey

The famous opening line of this country house tragedy – “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” – could apply to the pastoral genre as a whole, a field of storytelling which often suspends a sun-soaked moment in time soon to be lost. This film captures one sweltering summer at the Maudsley family’s resplendent Norfolk estate, when a visiting young Leo Colston – a class interloper himself – becomes an inadvertent messenger in the forbidden affair between an aristocratic lady (Julie Christie) and a rugged farmer (Alan Bates).

Adapted by Harold Pinter from L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel of the same name, the production met with more than one hiccup on its straw-lined road to completion, not least Hartley’s professed cursing of producer Alexander Korda in a dispute after Korda purchased the rights in the 1950s, which was followed by Korda’s death the next day. Michel Legrand’s foreboding score – recently repurposed for Todd Haynes’ May December (2023) – underpins what the director Joseph Losey described as the story’s “bitter core” in this otherwise resplendent period drama.

Director: Peter Hall

Peter Hall’s generation-spanning agrarian chronicle is a landmark feat of the cinematic pastoral tradition. It is set, as Peter Tuddenham’s rambling voiceover informs us, amid a “war between farmers and their men” – one which was witnessed by writer, essayist and Suffolk native Ronald Blythe over several decades and recorded in the 1969 book from which Hall’s film is adapted. Hall and Blythe embarked on a close collaboration, enlisting ordinary Suffolk locals to act and focusing on the reminiscences of the working class, with the land-owning gentry rarely allowed on camera. 

First-timer Garrow Shand – a real-life farmer – was selected for the threefold role of Tom Rouse (playing grandfather, father and son), for whom the allure of escape from the burdensome slog of hard work, in Australia, Newmarket or the military, looms over. His plights are captured by cinematographer Ivan Strasburg in hazy footage that drew on documentary-making techniques, with Blythe cameoing as the vicar. A British predecessor to the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) and Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Akenfield is somehow simultaneously a coming-of-age story, a curious centuries-blending bildungsroman and a day-in-the-life documentary.

Director: Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh brings his gift for creating quirkily eccentric but flesh-and-blood characters to bear in this holiday-gone-wrong comedy, set along the craggy Dorset coast, where the charms of the English countryside prove hard to come by for a duo of city-dwellers. Roger Sloman and Alison Steadman excel as an overbearing couple, Keith and Candice-Marie, who set out in search of unpasteurised milk, free-range eggs and peace and quiet, but fail abysmally on all counts.

After pitching their tent, a series of campsite dramatics ensue, as the pair clash with fellow campers and each other. A mildly farcical pastoral ditty, where low-stakes spats culminate in no worse than a roundabout campfire chase scene, the film was originally broadcast as part of the televised anthology series Play for Today. It was produced by David Rose, who would later become the commissioning editor at Film on Four.

Director: Andrew Grieve

Spending eight decades in the company of one Welsh family’s sons of the soil, Andrew Grieve’s adaptation of Bruce Chatwin’s third novel is as staggering as the lush Powys panoramas Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s camera surveys. Bob Peck plays a flighty-eyed farmer who becomes besotted with a vicar’s daughter (Gemma Jones, in only her third film role). Her dowry allows the newlyweds to rent a farm dubbed ‘The Vision’. 

Framed from the retrospective point-of-view of their twin sons (played by Mike and Robert Gwilym), their father’s love and kindness is steadily eroded by toil, hardship and xenophobia. In the foreground, Peck is formidable as a devout smallholder and volatile man of the house (the actor actually getting his hands dirty by learning to plough and pleach for his part). This hulking epic unravels against the backdrop of the British Empire in its final throes. 

Director: James Ivory

Although their earlier productions tended to be focused around India, producer-director team Merchant Ivory soon asserted themselves as doyens of the British pastoral genre with their sumptuous trinity of E.M. Forster adaptations, starting with A Room with a View (1985). Howards End is the third of these films, an enrapturing cautionary tale that takes place at the turn of the 20th century, as class divides begin to blur but are still pronounced.

What summons together its disparate array of characters – the heirs of true-blue businessman Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins), an upstart clerk (Samuel West) and the liberal but bourgeois Schlegel sisters (Bonham Carter, and Emma Thompson in her breakout role) – is the magnetic draw of a rose-shrouded cottage. It once belonged to the enigmatic deceased mistress of the manor (Vanessa Redgrave), who still seemingly haunts it.

Director: Terence Davies

Among Terence Davies’ final films, this wartime epic shot in Scotland’s the Mearns is a radiant rural ballad, with all the delicate beauty and deep-rooted empathy associated with the director’s oeuvre. Adapted from Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel of the same name (the first instalment in the A Scots Quair trilogy), it sees Agyness Deyn take the role of Chris Guthrie, a wistful young woman torn between her dreams of becoming a teacher and her love of the land. She is the daughter of a farmer: a bitter, malicious Peter Mullan, the patriarch who inflicts his wrath on each of his many family members. 

Returning to Davies’ recurrent dark themes of abuse, turbulent love, working-class life and women in dire straits, this dignified drama is set on the brink of World War I. Its arresting landscapes are a crucial reminder of life going on.

Director: Francis Lee

It’s rare for cinema’s queer stories to unfold against a backdrop of verdant meadows, sloping hills and picturesque villages, due to the constrictive small-mindedness often associated with these tucked-away communities. But Francis Lee’s directorial debut attempted to remedy that, with a blistering, intimate gay romance out in the Yorkshire wilds, which also manages to viscerally render on screen the sheer grubbiness and grind of agricultural work. 

At its epicentre is a severe but soft-centred Josh O’Connor as the sheep-shearing son of a farmer and Alec Secăreanu in a star-making turn as a Romanian gig worker, whom circumstances throw together.