Ken loach kes interviewing

In the 1950s and '60s, the revolutionary new wave of British Cinema put Northern streets onto the cinema screen . Whilst some of those British realist films dealt with challenging modern issues, there were largely two common threads which ran throughout many of them. The idea that the only way of having a better life was to leave your working-class nordlig town and escape, usually to London, and the idea that any nordlig accent was largely interchangeable. Ken Loach totally reconstructed British cinema. For the last 60 years, his films have highlighted real situations that affect real people and have authentic casting, preserving regional accents and dialects from the area in which that particular spelfilm is set. His films have been groundbreaking and have directly tackled important issues such as abortion and homelessness on screen for the very first time. He has been fearless in his approach and in his desire to document the lives of ordin

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Ken Loach: “I don’t agree you need a political cause to make a movie.”

Few moments in the last decade of cinema have had more impact than the foodbank scene in Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake.

Single mother Katie, played by Hayley Squires, cold with hunger and white with shame, hides behind a shelf and tears open a can of baked beans, spooning them down with her hands.

I remember even now the gasp of shock that accompanied the sound of the tin spurting open when the film premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. It was one of the most astounding moments I’ve witnessed in 25 years at Cannes, the collective sound of the truth of an intolerable social situation hitting home. Such was its impact, it carried the film to winning the Palme d’Or that year and has become a symbol of the cost of living crisis that has now engulfed the UK and many parts of Europe and America.

Now, I’m sitting with that scene’s director, Ken Loach, in the garret-style eaves of his offices in Soho

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The Respectful Medium: Ken Loach’s Kes

 

DAVID BRADLEY IN KES.

Where society fails, filmmakers step in. This is one way to view Kes, Ken Loach’s landmark film from 1970 about a working-class boy in northern England and the bird that gives him wings.
 
Billy Casper (David Bradley) lives in a fatherless household with his nasty brother (Freddie Fletcher) and inattentive mother (Lynne Perrie); at school, he is berated by teachers and picked on by his peers. It’s not that people are inherently mean; particularly in its school scenes, Kes inculpates a system that is callously indifferent to the drives and desires of boys like Billy. His gym teacher, not fully evolved himself, calls him an “ape,” and a teacher snarls that Billy has “just come out from under a stone.”
 
Nowhere is there any evidence, however, that the community to which these authority figures belong expects him to be anything but a primitive who will