Resurrected

• The film dramatizes the true ordeal of Guardsman Philip Williams, who was knocked unconscious during the Battle of Mount Tumbledown in the 1982 Falklands War, presumed dead, and reappeared seven weeks later — only to be branded a suspected deserter by the press. Williams later wrote about the experience in his memoir 'Summer Soldier.'
• It's Paul Greengrass's feature directorial debut. Before this, he worked as a documentary filmmaker on Granada Television's current-affairs series 'World in Action' — the same journalistic, handheld instinct he later carried into Bloody Sunday and United 93.
• The screenplay was written by Martin Allen, not Greengrass, who came to the project purely as director.
• Resurrected premiered in competition at the 39th Berlin International Film Festival in February 1989, where it won both the OCIC Award and the Interfilm Award (Otto Dibelius Film Award).
• It was produced by St Pancras Films for Channel 4 (Film4 Productions), not a television broadcaster premiering it on the small screen first.
• David Thewlis stars as the soldier (renamed Kevin Deakin for the film), with Tom Bell and Rita Tushingham playing his parents.

The real horror in the film isn't anything Deakin may or may not have done — it's how fast a grieving community and a tabloid press turn a traumatized survivor into content, guilty until proven telegenic.

The film deliberately never resolves what actually happened to Deakin during those seven missing weeks. That unresolved space is the same institutional grey zone Greengrass would return to again and again in his later work — a truth that's technically knowable but that no one with power over the story actually wants found.

Read alongside its BBC contemporary 'Tumbledown' (1988), about a wounded Falklands officer abandoned by an indifferent state, 'Resurrected' plays like an unofficial companion piece: both argue Britain's welcome home for its Falklands veterans was colder than the war itself.

Guardsman Kevin Deakin is knocked unconscious during the night assault on Mount Tumbledown in the 1982 Falklands War and left for dead. His unit reports him killed in action; his parents hold a memorial service. Seven weeks later he walks out of hiding — starved, disoriented, and instantly a problem nobody in power wants. The tabloids paint his survival as a miracle one week and a con the next; his old squadmates, stung by the implication they left a live man behind, start whispering coward, deserter, liar. The army wants the story buried quietly. The press wants a villain or a saint, whichever sells more papers. Deakin's parents (Tom Bell and Rita Tushingham) watch their relief curdle into siege as the community stages its own kangaroo court around a case the official one won't settle. Loosely based on the real ordeal of Falklands guardsman Philip Williams, Paul Greengrass's directorial debut — years before Bloody Sunday and United 93 — is less a war film than an anatomy of what a country does to a survivor it can't neatly file away.