TORONTO - When Ken Loach got the news that his latest film, "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," had just won the Golden Palm at last May's Cannes Film Festival, he couldn't have been more surprised.
"I was just about to cut the grass, when I was called back," he says, cool winter light knitting its way into his suite on the 22nd floor of a Bay St. hotel.
A longtime favourite at the French festival, English-born Loach, 70, was pleased that his new film, which is set to open March 16, was welcomed with open arms at the 59th edition of Cannes. "It was very nice; particularly nice because it was an award for the whole film, for the actors and the writer and everybody involved."
But by the time he got back home, the conservative British press was tarnishing Loach's film, which covers Ireland's War of Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War during the 1920s.
"Why does this man loathe his country so much?" blared a headline from the Daily Mail, while a columnist in the Times of London said Loach was more harmful than Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favourite filmmaker.
No stranger to controversy, his 1990 Northern Ireland-thriller "Hidden Agenda" fanned flames with a plotline that delved into the Royal Ulster Constabulary's supposed "shoot to kill" mandate, Loach says he wasn't setting out to rile critics in his home country. "It's just telling the stories of why we are who we are, and why we are where we are.
"It's such a big story, and it's one Paul (Laverty, the film's screenwriter) and I had wanted to do for a long time. It's the biggest event in Anglo-Irish history and it's hugely revealing about the British and how they dealt with their empire. It shows the brutality that they were prepared to inflict on people to keep what they saw as their strategic interests intact.
"If you know what Churchill did, you get a much different picture than the man in the Second World War."
Opening in 1920, "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" draws viewers into the lives of Irishmen who formed guerrilla armies to strike back at the 'Black and Tan' squads that were being imported from Britain to quash Ireland's bid for independence.
Bound by an intense love for his country, in the film's early scenes, Damien O'Donovan (played by Cillian Murphy) gives up a promising medical career at a London hospital to take up arms with his brother, Teddy (Padraic Delaney), and fight for freedom as part of the Irish Republican Army.
"The relationship between the two brothers is the heart of the film," Loach says, setting his palm underneath his chin.
As the battle rages, division within the IRA ranks bubbles, and the brothers' relationship becomes increasingly strained until, in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established an Irish Free State, they find themselves at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Loach says that it is this David-meets-Goliath aspect of the story that has rankled the right-wing press in his home country. "The film is just an extraordinary story of people, often no more than just farm labourers or shop-keepers, getting rid of one of the most powerful empires in the world."
Not shy about drawing allusions to an occupied Ireland with today's debacle in Iraq, Loach says much of what transpires in the film was upsetting to his actors because they knew much of what went on.
"We didn't want to romanticize violence or killing," he says, ruefully. "It's deeply shocking and horrible, which makes you realize that when something like the Lancet figures comes out and you hear that 650,000 people have died because of the war Bush and Blair started, everyone of those people is someone's family.
"Even though it's not cinema violence, where there's lots of blood, it's unsettling because what happened is not fantasy."
So when Loach is pointedly reminded of the critical opinions that have trailed the film around since its opening in Europe last year, the director, who is set to fly to New York City for a screening of the film at the Museum of Modern Art later that evening, is dismissive.
"It's just a handful of extreme right-wingers with very loud voices," he says. "The biggest audiences have been in France, Italy, Spain and Ireland, and (in those countries) the film has been received very warmly."
With "The Wind That Shakes the Barley's" opening coinciding with a Cinematheque Ontario career retrospective that begins March 23, Loach admits that while he has been celebrated overseas, his brand of socially-aware cinema has been a bit of a hard sell here in North America.
"Winning (the Palm d'Or) certainly validated the film," he smiles. "So we'll see what happens."
Staring out into the morning light poking its head through a throng of downtown high-rises, he's sure of one thing. "If a right-winger in Britain wants to get angry," he says with a slight shrug, "the film has the stamp of approval from the biggest film festival in the world."
"The Wind That Shakes the Barley" opens in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary this Friday.
For information on "Wind of Change: the Cinema of Ken Loach" go to: www.cinemathequeontario.ca
To read JAM's interview with Cillian Murphy click here.
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