Mike Leigh hits home with big-budget Peterloo Massacre movie
Leigh announced his next movie would be about the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when demonstrators in Manchester were cut down by the military authorities
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Your support makes all the difference.No films by British directors made it into competition at this year’s Cannes Festival – but Mike Leigh’s next offering looks a certainty for 2018.
Leigh announced that his next movie would be about the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when radical demonstrators in Manchester were cut down by the military authorities. “There has never been a feature film about the Peterloo Massacre,” said the 72-year-old film-maker. “Apart from the universal political significance of this historic event, the story has a particular personal resonance for me, as a native of Manchester and Salford.”
Leigh has a track record of making films with a social conscience, such as Vera Drake, but nothing at the scale of Peterloo, which is thought to have a budget of between £10m and £15m. Leigh’s last film, Mr Turner, was his biggest grossing, earning four Oscar nominations and winning Timothy Spall the best actor prize at last year’s Cannes.
Peterloo will tell the story of the 1819 peaceful pro-democracy rally at St Peter’s Field, when poor economic conditions and the lack of the vote led to 60,000 people protesting. Magistrates called on the military authorities to disperse the crowd and the cavalry charged with sabres drawn. It left 700 working people injured and 18 dead.
The outrage, dubbed Peterloo in reference to the Battle of Waterloo four years earlier, was a landmark in ordinary people winning the right to vote, and it led to the rise of the Chartist movement.
Andreas Wiseman of film magazine Screen International said Peterloo sounded “exciting and something close to his heart, like Mr Turner. It looks at themes including the working class, the protest movement and British history”.
The works in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival were announced on Thursday. While there were several films with significant British interest, including Macbeth, produced by the team that made The King’s Speech, as well as Carol and The Lobster, no film by a British director made it in.
Over the years films by Leigh have been welcomed by the festival to compete for the Palme d’Or. Peterloo is likely to be no different.
“It’s pretty likely to be in, probably in 2018,” Mr Wiseman said.
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