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MIKE LEIGH AT THE BCN FILM FESTIVAL
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This week, at the BCN FILM FEST we have received the visit of director Mike Leigh, and we have also been able to attend the screening of his latest film Peterloo, based on the events that took place after the victory of the Anglo-Prussian forces commanded by Wellington over Napoleon in Waterloo in 1815.
Peterloo by Jacqueline Riding review - the need for working-class history
This gripping, magnificent account of the 1819 St Peter's Field massacre is a welcome reminder of the role of class conflict in political change.
A short Q and A film was shown with Mike Leigh's film Peterloo when I went to see it. Its main point was that the massacre in Manchester in 1819 of campaigners for the reform of parliament, and in particular for universal manhood suffrage, had been more or less forgotten, even in the city itself. The claim provoked a rustle of dissent in the small provincial cinema where the film was showing, and expressions of disbelief in the pub afterwards. No one in either place claimed to be an expert, but plenty seemed to know something about the occasion when members of the 15th regiment of hussars and of the Manchester and Salford and Cheshire yeomanries charged into a crowd of unarmed protesters from Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale and other Lancashire towns as well as from Stockport, killing and wounding numbers of men and women who had been peacefully demonstrating.
READ MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/02/peterloo-manchester-massacre-jacqueline-riding-1819-protest-bloody-suppression
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