A NEW film exploring our relationship with the land is headed to a town arts venue.

Bridport storyteller Martin Maudsley is hosting a screening of the film Arcadia with the film's producer on Monday, November at 7.30pm.

The hit film, which has drawn comparisons to The Wicker Man, takes you on a journey into the beauty and brutality, magic and madness of our changing relationship with land and each other.

The film was co produced by Adrian Copper of Common Ground, Dorset. After the screening, Martin Maudsley will host a lively Q & A and discussion asking whether tradition – in film and music, in farming and storytelling – is good for us.

With Arcadia BAFTA award-winning Scottish director Paul Wright has repurposed archive material to tell a provocative story for our times.

Set to an original score by musicians Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp), Arcadia blends a mixture of film and TV footage from the BFI National Archive and regional archives around the UK, creating a powerful mosaic of images, sounds and moods, taking in folk carnivals and masked parades, hunting and harvesting, communes and raves, mechanisation, environmental destruction, fires, floods, storms. Arcadia reminds us what happens when our connection to nature, and each other, frays and unravels.

It explores and asks others what we have gained and lost in the last century, in the hope we will discover something of what we’ll need to survive in the next.

Arcadia was co-produced by, Adrian Cooper of Common Ground a charity based in Dorset, which has been at the forefront of community conservation and environmental education in England for the last thirty years.

He said: “We are a small, grassroots organisation that collaborate openly to reconnect people with nature and inspire communities to become responsible for their local environment. We believe that enjoying where you live and celebrating the connections people have with the wildlife and landscape on their doorstep, is at the root of meaningful conservation."

Martin Maudsley said: "Arcadia is entirely made up for film archive, mainly from the BFI National Archive, that spans over a hundred years of life and landscape in Britain. The breadth of material and range of seasons and settings is mind-boggling, a feast of moving images that is both visceral and sophisticated. The pain-staking care and attention of the film, directed by Paul Wright, reveals a how tradition and the past can become become a way of expressing something about today. The selection of scenes and archive images are vividly brought to life on the screen with an energy and effervescence that, like a good story well told, brings you to the edge of your seat"

*Arcadia, Bridport Arts Centre, Monday, November 5. Call the box office for tickets.