Glastonbury The Movie: 30th Anniversary Cut

There is a Glastonbury that exists only in memory. Before the phone masts and the wall-to-wall BBC coverage. Before tickets sold out in minutes. A Glastonbury where the cows shared the fields on equal terms, where dancing in a field was, quite sincerely, considered a radical act. That world is gone. But it was filmed.

Shot in Panavision CinemaScope at the 1993 Glastonbury Festival, Glastonbury The Movie is the record of what many consider the last great old-school Glastonbury, captured on the very cusp of the moment it was about to change forever. Director Robin Mahoney and the team embedded themselves in the festival and filmed everything: not the headline acts on the Pyramid Stage, but the real festival, the stone circle at sunrise, the rave tents and wandering performers, the parachute games and the Krishna food queues. The Verve in their very first festival appearance, so unknown they hadn’t even secured backstage camping. Spiritualised spending their entire fee on the fireworks display you see in the film. A cast of thousands completely unobserved, completely themselves. The film’s approach is deliberately anti-documentary. No voiceover, no talking heads, no presenter telling you how to feel. It simply opens its arms and lets you fall in, immersive, atmospheric, and shot through with the warmth of a long English summer weekend when everything, briefly, felt possible.

Hailed as “a masterpiece” by Mike Leigh and selected for eight international film festivals, Glastonbury The Movie: The 30th Anniversary Cut has been rebuilt in 4K from the original Panavision negatives, new scenes added, new Dolby 5.1 mix, every frame restored. The result is extraordinary. Back on the big screen. Thirty years on.