Peter Greenaway became interested in the political stories coming from South Africa at the time of apartheid, particularly the frequency at which political prisoners were dying by defenestration. Unable to make a documentary about these events, he devised a metaphor and turned the situation into a mocking documentary. Greenaway utilised his country home for the key image of the window and created a fictional group of people who would, for professional reasons, be associated with windows and created a number of situations whereby they fall out of windows of this house, in their attempts to fly.
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