Brexit gave story new meaning
In 2016, British director Francis Lee was in the throes of postproduction for “God’s Own Country” — a stunning romantic drama involving a sheep farmer and a Romanian immigrant — when he got a big surprise: His nation voted to leave the European Union.
Suddenly, Lee’s film had transformed, without him touching a frame.
“The day after the Brexit vote, we watched our movie, and it suddenly felt like a different film,” said the director, whose movie takes place in Yorkshire, his birthplace and ground zero of the British anti-immigration movement. “Until the vote, we had never seen the movie with those eyes. We didn’t do re-edits, but the film felt like it had a different dimension.”
On Friday, Nov. 10, Lee’s film will open at theaters in the Bay Area, where it has already wowed audiences at the San Francisco International Film Festival and won the audience award at the Frameline Festival. It has often been compared favorably to “Brokeback Mountain,” though the themes — and political undercurrents — are quite different.
“‘Brokeback’ is a brilliant movie, and the performances are incredible,” Lee said. “But in ‘Brokeback,’ the characters can’t be together, and both men are married to women. ‘God’s Own Country’ is not about coming out; it’s about falling in love.”
The center of that love is Johnny ( Josh O’Connor), an isolated sheep farmer who can’t even connect with his animals, let alone the humans around him. That all changes when his grandparents hire a Romanian migrant worker, Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), to help out on the farm.
“This film was not a political statement,” Lee said. “I knew I wanted the love interest to come from somewhere else. At the time, Romania was trying to gain entry into the EU, and people were afraid that ‘Gypsies’ were going to take our jobs.
“While working in a junkyard (to raise money for another film), I became great friends with a Romanian co-worker. I was shocked by his experiences of xenophobia — and how it affected him emotionally. Then when I did research, I found that there are lots of places in Transylvania similar to Yorkshire.”
And to be sure, Lee was an expert on Yorkshire, hailing from the hauntingly beautiful moors.
Like Johnny, Lee grew up in isolation, particularly in the 1970s, when there was no social media, no Internet, and no cell phones. Even today near his home, you have to travel half a mile just to get cell phone coverage.
“At age 20, I went away to drama school in London; and at the time, I had a strong Yorkshire accent,” Lee said. “I didn’t feel like I fit in at home or in London. But I could never get the landscape out of me. It informed who I was and how I saw the world. It always had this massive pull over me.
“I had never seen the landscape depicted in a way that was anything but bucolic and exciting — I’d always seen it as brutal, alienating and cold. I wanted to show the world how I see it.”
Two weeks before the shoot, Lee sent O’Connor and Secareanu off to farms, where they had to endure building walls, examining cows and shoveling lots of manure.
“They found it hard, but it really paid off in the film,” Lee said. “I love details, and everything had to be right. The costumes had to be bought in the shops that the characters would shop at. When they ate something, it had to be something that the family would really eat. At every level, we had to investigate truth.”
And for Lee, the ultimate truth involves the universal themes of falling in love, and making yourself vulnerable to being in love.
“I’ve learned to be more generous as a person,” he said. “Like Johnny did, I’ve learned to be more open, to accept love and to be loved. I want people to leave the film with hope in their hearts. There is always hope.”