The Dig (2021)

This is a beautiful film, with a great story, well told, and the cinematography is brilliant. It is quiet, but really satisfying. The front of the house story is this. It is set in May 1939, as Europe lurched towards war and Hitler on the brink of invasion of Poland. A widow, Edith Pretty (played by Carey Mulligan) hires an amateur excavator/archaeologist Basil Brown (played by Ralph Fiennes), to dig up the huge mounds on Edith's property in Suffolk. She and her now deceased husband bought the property with the intention of finding our what was underneath them and for various reasons that becaome clear later, she doesn't feel like she can wait. Brown is kind to every one. He speaks to the precocious young son of Mrs. Pretty, a boy whose head is filled with stories and fantasies about the cosmos, in such a way as to educate him and make him feel heard. He is a serious excavator used to being taken advantage of, and while he underestimates her at first, Mrs. Pretty does right by him. As he dug, mostly on his own with little help, he came across the skeleton of an 88-foot ship dating to the Anglo-Saxon period. This was the first phase of what has been called one of the most important archaeological discoveries in British archeology. The next phase was discovering the burial chamber within the ship, filled with a treasure trove of almost perfectly-preserved artifacts, made from gold and garnet: a stunning helmet, shoulder clasps, a golden belt buckle. A king must have been buried there, for all the effort to bury him in his ship and all the wealth they left with him. This is a great story of how Pretty sponsored the dig and then donated the artifacts to the British Museum, where they sit to this day, known as the "Sutton Hoo find."