Like Dario Fo before him, film-maker Peter Greenaway was inspired by a series of news stories involving political prisoners being “accidentally” thrown out of windows during police interrogations.

While Fo wrote Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Greenaway made Windows—a wry, pastoral and “slightly political” film, which, while making reference to Flemish painting, distilled fictionalized details of the deaths by defenestration of political prisoners.

Greenaway later said of Windows

“I had been appalled and fascinated by the statistics coming out of South Africa—political prisoners pushed out of windows, with fatuous excuses like they slipped on a bar of soap, they thought it was the door, etc. I built that into a fiction, trying to find all the possible reasons why anybody might fall out of a window, and compressed it into three-and-a-half-minutes and set these appalling facts up against a very idyllic landscape in order to create irony and paradox.

I think it sums up everything I’ve done afterwards: it’s about statistics, it’s very eclectic, it has a very lyrical use of landscape, it’s about death - four characteristics that have stayed with me ever since.”

The result has been described elsewhere as a “macabre and slightly political…darkly funny early short,” but I’ll let you be the judge of that.