Greene and Pleasant

Greene and Pleasant is a comic parable - a tongue-in-cheek exploration of the causes and consequences of isolationism. It is a Roald Dahl-esque tale of Farmer Pleasant and Farmer Greene, for whom a border dispute between their two fields escalates into absurdity - from barbed wire, to electrified fences, to rigorous border controls with passport checks for sheep. Their developing cold war receives its ironic counterpart in a sing-song, rhyming narration. This narrative style, reminiscent of overtly didactic children's fables, subverts the film's seriousness.

The film opens with one long shot, as a dot on the landscape gradually becomes Farmer Greene, measuring the distance between his house and his neighbour's field with yellow measuring tape. When it transpires that his neighbour, Father Pleasant, has had the same idea, the two gradually fall into a competition to secure their own property. Spending all their time at the border between their lands, their flocks and long-suffering wives are forgotten - instead, they devote their time and energy into creating ever-more advanced security to ensure that not a single crow from the land of the other can trespass. They become local legend, with the resulting media attention only deepening their silent enmity.

At the close of the film, the narrator tells us " And I've heard they are waiting there still", as the camera zooms out to show two green fields surrounded by a wasteland at war, the two farmers absorbed in their petty conflict.

This film takes inspiration from not only the tensions thrown into relief by Brexit, but from conflicts which have long been part of our national narrative and that our international isolationism require that we face - the disappearance of public land, the tragedy of the commons and the failure of anarchic agrarian movements such as the Diggers. These are national wounds that have disproportionately affected rural areas, and which Brexit should provide us with an opportunity to confront head-on.

By parodying the parable-form, Greene and Pleasant undermines efforts to offer an easy, didactic analysis of Brexit. We are interested less in the question of borders than in what they enclose - a question which Brexit is only the latest attempt to answer in our history. If Brexit was (as some suggest) motivated by the desire to take back control of our land, perhaps it is time to consider what "our land" means, and how it came to mean what it does today. Arguably, the seeds of isolationism were sown from the moment that the enclosure of common land became law. If ours is a Green and Pleasant land, then whose land is it? How can we be Britons when we do not even own Britain?