This special limited edition slipcover (designed by Brandon Schaefer) is limited to 1,000 units and is only available on our website and at select indie retailers. Absolutely no major retailers will be stocking them.
The Film Desk is a theatrical and disc distributor founded in 2007 by Jake Perlin, dedicated to releasing masterpieces of international cinema, with a focus on titles never before released in the United States, or long out of circulation, primarily in new 35mm prints.
A powerful, unabashedly pro-socialist documentary of England’s postwar transformation from a working-class hellscape in the 1930s. Endemic poverty and Dickensian squalor are upended by Clement Attlee’s 1945 Labour Party landslide over the patrician Winston Churchill. What follows is the nationalization of the mines, railways, postal service — and the jewel in the crown, the National Health Service, which made medical care free of charge.
"The Spirit of ‘45 masterfully collages first-person accounts of prewar England with archival footage that exposes the disparity between everyday reality and the myth of the Greatest Empire on Earth." –Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum
directed by: Ken Loach
starring: Various
2013 / 99 min / 1.85:1 / English DTS-HD MA 2.0 & 5.1
Additional info:
Overall rating: 4.611111 / 5 from 36 reviews.
Review topics: ["documentary","release","transfer","discovery","history","landscapes","film","doc"].
"This release was a random buy but a pleasant discovery. It attempts to describe the movement to rebuild great Britain after WWII. I wish some of that spirit could be revived today. Excellent audio and video transfer."
"It's a fascinating piece of history. It's relevant even today and am really greatful to have a copy. It's informative enough to justify multiple viewings."
"We need this in the US"
"Fascinating time capsule of the rise and fall of the English welfare state. This documentary really has the energy of your friend who thinks they can go off their medication now that they've balanced things out, only to spiral again when they're off. The landscape of pre-war Britain and the way the social services lifted the country up afterward, only to have it all crumble again, feels as relevant now as ever."
"Very interesting to learn about the radical changes in the UK following the war under the Attlee government. Ken Loach is one of the UK's best to do it!"
"Ken Loach weaves interviews and historical footage into a collective memory of solidarity, public ownership, and social reconstruction"
"I bought this sight unseen because the state of the common good in the US is in the shitter. Surely there’s another way to look after the citizenry of a nation? And I want to see a warts and all take, what the ideal was, how it was corrupted, what went wrong and potentially how to do it better. Because this Leviathan, Hobbesian approach to governance sucks."
"I liked this documentary, although I don't know how much rewatched value it has. An interesting look at a period in history I wasn't familiar with."
"Fascinating. Great slip and transfer"
"The social democracy to neo-liberalism to fascism pipeline is about to burst, and I don't think we can go back to patching up capitalism in the hopes that this time if we knock the obscenely wealthy down a few pegs but still have obscenely wealthy people, that they won't somehow do Thatcher 2. 0. Still, it's valuable for Loach and others to document the faint memory of what life could be like if we could just make them afraid of the working class now as they were then."
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