The Orchard takes its narrative form from the four-act structure of Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’. Its underlying tensions and levels of acting are aided by Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’. The film is concerned with tensions between collective memory, both fictional and real; problems with nostalgia as the filter for remembering and forgetting; and the barriers these can produce between the personal world and the social/political world.