Gerrard Winstanley was a mid-seventeenth-century Christian Socialist who organized the poor into a commune called the Diggers. Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo have created an almost perfect rendering of this gentle man's life and thoughts, with dialogue taken for the most part directly from Winstanley's writings. Jonathan Rosenbaum calls Winstanley “mysteriously beautiful...and the best pre-twentieth-century historical film I can recall since The Rise Of Louis XIV or Straub's Bach film....

“All the roles but two are played by nonprofessionals. And the fanatical pains taken with period detail - including everything from original battle armor and home-made huts and costumes to virtually extinct breeds of cows, pigs and birds, and a barn transferred from Essex piece by piece - could be called comparable to Stroheim's if it weren't for the fact that all this was done on an impoverished budget....

“...Like Miles Halliwell's haunted and haunting performance as Winstanley and the sheer physicality of the film's awesome grasp of people, weather, and terrain, it belongs to another world, but a world of textures that is re-created from the roots, not recollected in tranquility out of scrapbooks....” (in Film Comment).

Kevin Brownlow is perhaps best known to film buffs as author of the now classic study of the silent film, “The Parade's Gone By”; and for his extraordinary preservation and restoration work on Abel Gance's 5-hour epic Napoleon, including the famous triptych sequence. Other films by Brownlow include his documentary on Abel Gance, The Charm Of Dynamite; his first feature film, It Happened Here (also made with co-director Mollo), filmed in 1956 when Brownlow was still a schoolboy and financed out of his pocket money! Last year Brownlow's second book on Hollywood's pioneering years, “The War, the West and the Wilderness,” was published; and Hollywood, Brownlow's critically acclaimed BBC television series on that same period, with its fascinating clips and interviews, is presently being aired locally on Channel 2.