Though he is respected internationally, it's never been easy to find Ken Loach's films at the theatre -- particularly in his home country.
The reason could be found in a recent London Daily Mail headline, atop a conservative piece about his latest film, The Wind That Shakes the Barley -- a frankly partisan film about the rebellion that gave birth to the Irish Republican Army in the 1920s.
The headline: "Why Does Ken Loach Loathe His Country So Much?"
Being contrarian comes with a price. "It's been pretty hard to get seen in England," he says. "To give you an example, in France we had 300 copies of the film screening publicly. In Ireland, 70. In Britain, 40. It gives you an idea of the struggle we have in our own country.
"What's behind it is a hatred of anyone who says the British Empire was not some kind of charitable institution and the British army are not angels of mercy. They're particularly sensitive about Ireland, because it's still going on. You can be a little more objective about India because it's so far in the past.
"But the blindness is not monolithic. The vast majority of the ordinary people have a preparedness to be interested in another side of the story. But if you don't hear about it in the press, and if it's not in the cinema, you're not motivated to follow it up."
The Wind That Shakes the Barley opens in a few Canadian markets this week.
The genial 70-year-old filmmaker has a long history of politically polarizing "underdog" filmmaking, telling the stories of abused blue-collar workers (Riff Raff) and revolutionaries (Carla's Song). When the Sept. 11-themed anthology film project 11'09"01 was produced, he was one of 11 international filmmakers chosen to contribute. And where other filmmakers adopted a sympathetic tone, he used the occasion to make a documentary polemic recalling the CIA-orchestrated coup in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973. It seemed to break the moratorium on America-bashing that was in place after 9/11 and before the invasion or Iraq.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Loach's second examination of the Irish "troubles," after his 1975 mini-series Days of Hope) puts a bloody face on the British "Black And Tan" troops who were charged with putting down a Republican rebellion.
And it places the context on the shoulders of two brothers -- a young medical student named Damien (Cillian Murphy) who gives up a promising medical career to join his brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) in the nascent IRA, after witnessing the beating death of a pub-mate at the hands of the Black And Tans and the beating of a conductor who refused to allow British soldiers on his train. Later the oppression tightens. (In a torture scene, Teddy has his fingernails pulled off.)
Later, after the truce that saw the creation of the Irish "Free State," Damien and Teddy are torn apart by the IRA's decision to reject the deal and take the fight to the North. We see the IRA torn between factions fighting for social change, and others in league with the merchants and landowners to maintain the status quo.
"It's a hugely important story," Loach says, "the pivotal moment between England and Ireland."
I suggest the inability to get his films shown for political reasons is a recurring theme in his career. "Yes," he says with a laugh, "you could say that.
"But it's not only me. British cinema is more dominated by American cinema and values than any other European country ... In fact, in the era of Bush and Blair, we are more colonized in every respect, which is ironic. We are the original colonizers and now we are the colonized."
More Artists
