Akenfield

Akenfield is a film made by Peter Hall in 1974, based loosely upon the book Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village by Ronald Blythe (1969). Blythe himself has a cameo role as the vicar and all other parts are played by real-life villagers who improvised their own dialogue. There are no professional actors in the piece. The director's father Reg Hall, a station master born in Bury St Edmunds, appears briefly as the village policeman walking down a lane with a bicycle. Blythe's book is the distillation of interviews with local people, and his technique is somewhat echoed in the pioneering verbatim theatre style developed in London Road at the National Theatre in 2011. Akenfield the film is a work of fiction, based on an 18-page story synopsis by Blythe. Most of the filming was done at weekends, when the cast was available, and shooting took almost a year – following the changing seasons in the process.
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== Links to Peel ==
Peel saw Akenfield when it was shown on television and mentioned it in his Sounds column of 1 February 1975: 
:We did watch Akenfield, though, and thought it excellent - although I have an uneasy feeling that all the smart critics will have attacked it with their customary violence. Perhaps if Peter Hall had dilmed it in black and white and Poland, and had all the main characters go mad or die of consumption, he'd have done better. Subtitles in Korean, Peter, or possibly Serbo-Croat. If you saw "Akenfield" maybe you'll understand why we like living in East Anglia - despite the fact that the unspeakable Ipswich eliminated LIVERPOOL from the cup....
==External Links==
*Wikipedia
*IMDb
*Official Website
Category:Films