I believe that British director Alan Clarke (1935-1990) died without us in Panama having any idea of his work and his reputation as a radical and iconoclastic man within theater, TV, and cinema production in the United Kingdom. When the first video clubs appeared, I remember renting and seeing «Rita, Sue, and Bob Too» (1987), which made a very good impression on me; but it is not until now that I see another of his films: «Penda's Fen», made for the BBC.

On the internet you can find information about Clarke, who was inclined to social realism and center of controversy and censorship for his television production. Clarke understood the medium as a very useful way to educate and alert the voting masses, instead of drugging them with "reality shows", talent hunts, violent (fast) movies, game shows or newscasts plagued with yellowish and red notes. In his work, he made films about everyday issues "that are not talked about", such as criminal acts of the English army in Northern Ireland, juvenile prisons, incest between fathers and daughters, multinational companies, racist "skinheads", military interrogations, teenage drug addiction, Margaret Thatcher's politics, football hooligans, with casts that included David Bowie, Tim Roth, and Gary Oldman.

«Penda's Fen» (after the last pagan king of the Anglo-Saxons, which led to the name of Pinfin, the town where the action takes place) is an admirable film in every sense, aural, visual, dramaturgical and technical, in in which the writer David Rudkin combined dreamlike, mythical, and religious lines to tell the story of Stephen Franklin (Banks), the fanatical, manichean, and puritan son of a vicar, who makes a difficult transition to adulthood at the end of high school. In this stage of his life and education, he rebels against the militia, discovers his ambisexuality, studies the music of Sir Edward Elgar, has encounters with the country's pagan past (through the name Pinfin and King Penda himself), with the ghost of Master Elgar, with materializations of opposites, virtue and desire, by means of an angel and a devil. In the end, Stephen is so enlightened in his search for identity (personal and national), but at the same time so exhausted by his religious, erotic and ideological conflicts, that he is forced to take a qualitative leap in which fantasy plays a central role to reach the stage of a young adult.

I warn that this film is not at all for the mentally lazy, nor for the "millennials" reluctant to illustration, nor for its declared opponents, the fans of football, «Star Wars», Tarantino, Netflix, Disney, TV series and Marvel heroes. Neither for the militants of the neo-left nor for the old and stale left-wing faction, nor for those obsessed with their bodies and sexual identity. There is something interesting here for almost all of them, but I don't know if they will have the patience or the openness to listen to philosophical dialogues in pristine British English, amidst the apparitions of the angel, the devil, Penda, Elgar and Stephen's erotic fantasies and dreams of weird rites. Shot in 16mm, the film was restored by the British Film Institute.