Glastonbury: The 30th Anniversary Cut

Glastonbury The Movie: The 30th Anniversary Cut is the definitive cinematic record of one of the significant moments in British cultural history, the Glastonbury Festival of 1993. A 4K rebuild in original CinemaScope format, with a new Dolby 5.1 surround mix and graded from scratch, this is not a restoration. It is a reinvention.

Shot using the same Panavision CinemaScope cameras and lenses as the great Hollywood epics, the film captures three days of music, magic and midsummer madness from the ground level up, the point of view not of the elite, but of the festival goer. There is no narration. No captions. No backstage access. Just the raw, unfiltered, gloriously human experience of being there. 

It was 1993. The BBC cameras had not yet arrived. The fence was still permeable. There were no phone masts. Half the people there had bunked in, and hardly anyone knew who was on the main stage. Popular culture in the UK was poised on the edge of a seismic shift, and these filmmakers, armed with Panavision CinemaScope cameras and an army of friends, caught it all.

It opened in UK cinemas in 1996. Thirty summers on, that world feels like another planet. But the film endures on the big screen, in 4K, with Dolby sound, it is quite  something to behold.