Lord of the Flies (1963)

Directed by: Peter Brook
Starring: James Aubrey, Tom Chapin, Hugh Edwards
Duration: 92’

One day, out of the blue, war breaks out and a bunch of British schoolchildren find refuge in an exotic island in the middle of nowhere. All alone and unable to contact the outside world, the boys try to organize a society from scratch, despite the constant disputes that threaten the already fragile new circumstance.

If hope for a better world effectively lies within the children, this same hope sinks in the most dramatic way in the sea of the Cold-War pessimism which surrounds the island of the «Lord of the Flies».
The film of course is no other but the classic allegory novel issued by William Golding in 1954, which was exemplarily adapted on the big screen by Peter Brook. 

Even more, the fact that the British director shot the film with an unripe cast of kids in Puerto Rico at the time when the neighboring Cuba was under invasion at the Bay of Pigs, adds to the film a semantic dynamic which follows it until today. Nektarios Sakkas

«Classics Illustrated» tribute in collaboration with the British Council