Notes on The Film

This Blessed Plot is set in the Essex village of Thaxted, where fiction and truth are wound tightly together like tree roots, so it’s impossible to tell where one starts and the other ends. The story centres around Lori, a female Chinese filmmaker, who visits Thaxted to look for the subject of her next film. She encounters characters dead and alive, each offering an insight into England’s past and present state. From the ghost of the early 20th century radical Christian socialist vicar Conrad Noel to Keith, a man haunted by betrayal and the sudden return into his life of his petty criminal friend known as “Uncle”; and Maggie, the church-going wife of a deceased Morris dancer. Deploying a cast of non-professional actors, This Blessed Plot tells a tale of love, loss and betrayal. Thaxted is an extraordinary place, a beautiful old English village where myths of England and Englishness play out in folk memory of the Peasants Revolt, William Blake and William Morris. But their dream of a time when things were good in England is also summoned by a darker and angrier force increasingly present in these last years. In This Blessed Plot, we look at the power of fiction in the world of documentaries. We explore ideas of performance of the self and how people find an articulacy of expression through objects and self-curation.

The documentary form is always a shapeshifter but still has the power to stop you in your tracks. In this film, it’s linked to the music of Gustav Holst (who lived in the town) and the slow and macabre folk dance of The Abbots Bromley, brought to Thaxted in Noel’s time from its home in the Midlands. Is it truth or fiction? This Blessed Plot takes you to the myth and make-believe world, where docufiction was born and where it belongs. It recognises that modernity expressed its anxieties through tales from before it was born. Thaxted is an idealised village the Boulting Brothers chose to make their 1939 documentary Ripe Earth (which features heavily in the film) when they decided to make a film romanticising rural England. There was a reason they chose Thaxted: because their friend Conrad Noel was the vicar. Noel was known as the “Red Vicar”; who hoisted the Sinn Fein flag inside the church after the Easter Rising and the red flag a year later following the Russian Revolution. Now, Noel’s socialism seems to have become the hardest myth to believe. Following his last hybrid feature, The Filmmaker’s House (2020), Marc Isaacs again embraces the artistic freedom that working with a micro-budget and a cast of unknown non-professionals provides. This Blessed Plot is his attempt to innovate by remaining outside conventional industrial film production structures. He works with people from some of his past documentary films and new characters he has encountered in Thaxted.