The Film

Hope Mansell is a rural Herefordshire village with a population of around two hundred.

 

Between the summer of 2017 and the autumn of 2020, people of all ages took part in extended interviews to produce a portrait of a village at a time of change. The resulting feature-length documentary, A Parcel of Time, is now available to rent or buy. However, a film cannot hope to tell all the stories of the 26 hours of interview. This site also contains the full interviews, with transcripts and more, forming a kind of time capsule of the village as it was in that period and a piece of oral history. The film will never date, because it will always show the village as it was in the parcel of time when it was made.

 

For now, Hope Mansell is still a village of farms, but this is the story of all villages in England. Of many it's the past, of some it's the future: the transition from a community of farmsteads, to a community of incomers.

 

The film is produced by Ian Lewis (visit storymachine.co.uk for more) with music arranged and performed by David Cooper Orton from traditional tunes collected in Herefordshire by Ella Mary Leather.