Red Riding: 1983

Red Riding: 1983 closes Channel 4's three-part adaptation of David Peace's Yorkshire novel cycle, broadcast on 26 March 2009. Anand Tucker (best known then for Hilary and Jackie and Shopgirl) takes over the directing chair from Julian Jarrold and James Marsh. Tony Grisoni once again writes the screenplay, completing his year-long adaptation of Peace's Nineteen Seventy-Four, Nineteen Eighty and Nineteen Eighty-Three.

David Morrissey returns from earlier instalments in an expanded role, alongside Mark Addy as the broken-down solicitor Maurice Jobson, with Sean Bean, Saskia Reeves, Jim Carter, Peter Mullan, Daniel Mays and Robert Sheehan filling out the ensemble. Cinematography is by David Higgs, who shot the film on RED digital, the first major British production to do so for theatrical-quality output. The visual contrast between the trilogy's three films (16mm, 35mm, RED) was a deliberate decision by producer Andrew Eaton to mark each decade's shifting institutional rot through texture as much as narrative.

The trilogy as a whole earned a BAFTA for Best Photography and Lighting (Fiction) in 2010 and was released theatrically in the United States via IFC Films, where it played in art-house cinemas as a single nine-hour event. Critics including A. O. Scott at The New York Times and Manohla Dargis treated the project as a singular accomplishment of British television film-making, comparable only to Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog in its scope and integration.