EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT
FOR NEARLY 60 years, Ken Loach has been telling stories about the people most movies ignore. From films like Kes and Poor Cow at the start of his career, to Palme d’Or winner I, Daniel Blake in the latter stages, he has been a fierce champion of the working class —and fiercer critic of the governments trying to demonise them —centring his films on ordinary people often punished by cruel circumstance. No British director has done more to show the great unfairness of society.
Now, at the age of 87, he has directed his last film. The Old Oak, a drama about the tension that occurs when a group of Syrian refugees are homed in a declining former mining town in County Durham, is a fitting final Loach. In its focus on a struggling ex-mining community, it has echoes of his best film, Kes, and in its focus on the refugee experience it is searingly contemporary. Above all, it is a story of shared humanity.