Sunset Song

1971•4h 18m

Chris Guthrie lives with her family on a bleak farm in North East Scotland at the beginning of the 20th century. On her mother's death, she assumes the managing of the farm with her father and her older brother, but the men fall out, leaving Chris and her father to manage it alone. When her father dies, she considers abandoning the farm, but decides to carry on alone. She marries a young farmer, Ewan Tavendale. They have a baby and are happy for the first time, then the First World War breaks out, Ewan enlists and dies in France, and Chris is left once again to carry on with the farm.

Production

Seasons

6 Episodes • Premiered 1971

1. The Unfurrowed Field

'But for all my reading and schooling, two Chris Guthries there were that fought for my heart and tormented me.'

2. Ploughing

'You knew you'd never be the same again, but the world went on, and you went with it. So you folded up your dreams and laid them away with the dark quiet corpse that was your childhood.'

3. Drilling

'But a worse thing came as slow September dragged to its end. A thing I would never tell a soul. Festering away in the closet of my mind, the memory would lie until it died.'

4. Seed Time

'It wasn't like waking from a dream, marrying, but more like going into one. And I wasn't sure, not for days, what things we'd dreamt and what actually done.'

5. Harvest

'Our best friends were out of Kinraddie now. But we had ourselves. And seeing your Ewan grow straight and strong, with that slim body like his father's, it made a strange dizziness go singing in my heart.'

6. The Song

'Everything I had ever loved and desired went out to the madness beyond the hills on that ill road that flung its evil white ribbon down into the dusk.'