So your military coup has been successful and you want to curry favour with your rather wary and rebellious populace – what do you do? If you're the junta that's recently taken over Thailand, you create a 'bring back happiness' campaign that first involved free haircuts and music festivals, and has now graduated to giving away cinema tickets.
But rather than seeing the new X-Men on the state's dime, Thailand was treated to free screenings of The Legend of King Naresuan Part V, a historical drama in which the titular ruler unifies the country and resists its previously domineering neighbour Burma. Showing the film, directed by a relative of the royal family, is an explicit and fairly unsophisticated bit of nation-rebuilding, and in a month where anti-junta protestors took up the three-fingered salute from the Hunger Games movies, it's another example of the propagandist power of cinema.
So what films get you flagwaving? For my money, perhaps the finest example of the UK film industry trying to bring the country together is in the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Their films during World War II had crowdpleasing Nazi-bashing alongside remarkably even-handed moments that reminded us of the humanity of the enemy, as in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Meanwhile their dizzyingly romantic A Matter of Life and Death was a glorious affirmation of the special relationship between the UK and US, embodied by David Niven and Kim Hunter's love which shrugs off the bounds of the afterlife.
From the crassly jingoistic to the harmlessly patriotic, let us know your own favourites below.
