Liverpool Sound and Vision rating 8.5/10

Cast: Tuppence Middleton, Daniel Mays, James Purefoy, David Hayman, Christian Brassington, Sarah Winter, Dave Johns, Noel Clarke, Jade Anouka, Christopher Villiers, Maggie Steed, Jo Hart, Sam Swainsbury, Oliver Wellington, Julian Seager, Ken Drury, Sandy Foster, Charlotte Baker, Mae Voogd.

A nation apart but attached to England by the narrowest of land borders, a distinctive people who have been ravaged by plunderers and prospectors, who up until only recently have been told that their heritage and language was barren, extinct and their people mocked for their accent, their willingness to not join in the race that has splintered other communities in the name of gentrification. Cornwall may be an English county but it is to be argued that it is own country and woe betide the incomer who tries to take away their language, their song.

A story inspired by the ordinary is one in which British cinema seems to excel in, perhaps it is down to the fact that like the sense of occasion in which the medium and the native think alike, the powerful tale of the underdog winning through, the attention highlighted on a group of people, or indeed the individual, who have been neglected; everybody has a story, everybody deserve to have it heard, and whilst history may well be written from the top down, it is in the beautiful commonplace that history becomes in fact extraordinary.

Fisherman’s Friends is one such tale in which the cinematic attention is gratefully shifted from the sense of the scripted superhero which has infiltrated the screens of late, and away from the gilded over excitable, often pandering, to violence and sex offerings, and in which the ordinary story stands out, the remarkable is added to by the scenic, the story unadulterated and just flows like the Tamar, cutting between the two different landmasses, joined at the hip but ready to be split apart, forcibly or with ease, it does not matter in the end, as long as the tale is told and told well.

With beautiful performances by James Purefoy, Daniel Mays and especially David Hayman as the aging seaman Jago, Fisherman’s Friends is a British film that could, and deserves to, rival some of the classic British films of the last 30 years, one that goes deeper in its search to reveal identity, and one that embraces the uniqueness of the Cornish soul.

Ian D. Hall