Precious Gems Film Club: By Our Selves

As part of Friends of the Earth Birmingham’s Summer Season of Film, Precious Gems Film Club presents’By Our Selves’, part documentary, part dramatic reconstruction retracing a walk made by the 19th-century poet John Clare (Toby Jones). The screening will be followed by a Q&A from artist, filmaker and long time colaborator with Andrew Kötting, Anonymous Bosch.

John Clare (1793-1864) the “peasant poet,” described the natural world from his own lived experience growing up in a agricultural labouring family. Deeply tied to the countryside, he saw the land as part of his identity— when enclosure reshaped rural England, that connection fractured. He later struggled with mental illness and spent years in asylums, famously escaping and walking 80 miles home from Epping Forest to Northamptonshire in 1841, driven by a need to reconnect with a place.