Mourning Wood (2006)

Made with funding from Arts Council England East. This film's first showing was at London's Gasworks gallery during August 2006, in their exhibition of new animation by artists: Blink.

Mourning Wood’s narrative is inspired by the formerly widespread British practice of burying suicides at crossroads, village boundaries or isolated roadsides (impaling them to trap their tortured souls was only made illegal in Britain in 1823) and by the allegorical medieval folk song John Barleycorn in which the title character is ritually murdered, dismembered and buried in a field, only to grow up again in the spring. This is a late survival of the prehistoric European practices and beliefs that led to the killings of numerous sacrificial victims later found preserved in peat deposits and bogs throughout northern Europe. Many people found guilty of witchcraft were also hanged, burned and/or buried at crossroads during the Puritan witch hunts of the seventeenth century.

You can watch the film below. The password is Barleycorn.