God's Own Country

Francis Lee's God's Own Country won the World Cinema Directing Award at Sundance 2017 and the British Independent Film Award for Best British Independent Film. The film was Lee's debut feature; he had previously been a Yorkshire-Bradford theatre actor and had drawn on his own experience growing up on a Yorkshire upland sheep farm. The film consolidated Josh O'Connor, then twenty-six, as a major British acting talent — leading to his subsequent The Crown, Aftersun and Challengers casting.

On a windswept upland Yorkshire farm, the young shepherd Johnny Saxby (O'Connor) lives a numbed, grief-tinged life — his ailing father unable to work the land, his grandmother quietly authoritative, his social outlet limited to weekend pub-binges and casual one-night encounters at the cattle market. When the Romanian migrant worker Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu) arrives for lambing season, the rhythm of Johnny's days begins to change.

The film operates in a register of quiet rural physical realism — the lambing-pen sequences, the dry-stone-wall repair, the long Yorkshire-moor exteriors — and its central romance is staged with an unsentimental physicality that has been compared favourably to Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. Joshua James Richards's photography of the Yorkshire upland country, the limited dialogue and patient pacing, and the two central performances combine into one of the most quietly affecting British films of the 2010s.