The Lie of the Land

Directed by Molly Dineen

A very incisive and hard-hitting documentary about the way in which life for farmers and other people who depend on the countryside for their livelihood is changing for the worse as a result of the decline in home-grown food and the banning of fox-hunting. Farmers are having to kill calves which it is uneconomical to keep, paying token amounts to the local fox-hunt as unofficial knackers to dispose of the carcases for feeding to the fox-hounds. Why should society seem to care so much about the fate of hunted foxes and yet apparently so little about what happens to unwanted cattle which are cross-breed or the wrong sex? There is great resentment (as typified by the Countryside Alliance marches in London) to changes that are being imposed by a government that people in the country feel is neglecting their wishes in preference to those of the city-dwellers.