God's Own Country

Francis Lee's debut feature God's Own Country won the World Cinema Directing Award at Sundance 2017 and the British Independent Film Award for Best British Independent Film. Lee had been a theatre actor in Yorkshire and Bradford before he turned to directing, and he drew on his own experience of growing up on a Yorkshire upland sheep farm. The film made Josh O'Connor, then twenty-six, a major British acting talent, and casting in The Crown, La chimera and Challengers followed.

On a windswept upland Yorkshire farm, the young shepherd Johnny Saxby (O'Connor) lives a numbed, grief-tinged life. His ailing father can no longer work the land, his grandmother's authority needs few words, and his social life comes down to weekend binges at the pub and casual one-night encounters at the cattle market. Then the Romanian migrant worker Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu) arrives for lambing season, and the rhythm of Johnny's days begins to change.

Lee works in a plain, physical rural realism: the lambing pens, the repairs to dry-stone walls, the long exteriors on the moor. He stages the central romance with an unsentimental physicality that drew comparisons with Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, and it holds up to the comparison. Joshua James Richards photographs the upland country with real feeling, the dialogue is sparse, the pacing is patient, and the two central performances make this one of the most affecting British films of the 2010s.