Name: News from Nowhere
Genre: Drama
Duration: 53 min
Rating: 5.7
Cast: Timothy West, Kika Markham, John Cater

A 1978 Arts Council film featurette about William Morris - poet, writer, designer, socialist and advocate of work to be turned into a fulfilling, enlightening and liberating activity and experience through arts and crafts for everyone. As an introduction to Morris we have a real but dramatised trip in a boat up the Thames from London to just beyond Oxford which Morris (Timothy West) undertook in 1880, and later turned into a book which gives this film it's title. Escorting him up river is his wife Jane (Kika Markham), his dog (unidentified in the cast list), his friend Richard Grosvenor (John Cater) and a boatman (Dave Hastings) - the craftsman of the trip as it were, fulfilling or not. Producer/director Alister Hallum's film (which he co-wrote with Philip Henderson) is used to expound and illustrate some of the ideas, beliefs, passions, themes and obsessions of a man seemingly with one foot in the past and an eye on the future (his 'contradictions' are rather apparent), who was an advocate of Medieval architecture, deindustrialisation, the delights of a rustic ideal, and socialism. During the trip up river there are memory flashbacks to his relationship with the painter Gabriel Rossetti (Clive Swift), the influence of John Ruskin, a trip to Iceland, and we also learn about his pet hates including Wagner, neo-classical architecture (and modern), belching factories, and bloated money driven capitalists. Complimented by effective cinematography by Jeremy Stavenhagen and John Bulmer, this is a mixture of the evocative and realist.

The drama genre is a broad category that features stories portraying human experiences, emotions, conflicts, and relationships in a realistic and emotionally impactful way. Dramas delve into the complexities of human life, often exploring themes of love, loss, morality, societal issues, personal growth, with the aim to evoke an emotional response from the audience by presenting relatable and thought-provoking stories.

Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight (2016)

Biography of William Morris (1834-1896), regarded as a pioneer of Socialist thought and a founder of the ecological movement.

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News from Nowhere

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