Requiem for a Village

Here the dead quite literally arise, and an old man follows them into church where, his youth regained, he relives his wedding in a sleepy Suffolk village, now under siege from ice-cream vans, motorcycles and excavators. The film proceeds, within the framework of the old man's working day, slowly and with scrupulous detail, to build a picture of the village as it was in his youth. What separates the movie, however, from a mere wistful lament for happier times, is the way in which its parts cohere around the central conceit that, through memory, the past and present merge to form a bond which proves stronger than death itself.