I, Daniel Blake, (2016)
I am of a generation that remembers one particular lesson, a day (in my case in Brockworth school) when lessons were cancelled and we were directed into the sports hall to watch a film - a black and white film (yawn) - some old telly thing made in 1966 that we were to watch for the benefit of our education. This was the Seventies and the film was Cathy Come Home.
Ken Loach was the director of Cathy Come Home and by the time I saw it, he was already established as a controversial film and TV director. To some he represented the world as it is, to others he propagated dangerous left wing polemic. He had developed an approach to the portrayal of life that was both to confirm him as a master of his craft and a thorn in the side of the establishment.
His canon of work covers decades from 1964 to today. Few can forget Cathy Come Home, but before that there was Z Cars and after that there was Kes in 1969 and in 1975 TV series Days Of Hope. There were struggles to get things made, rejections and controversies and then the atmosphere of the Eighties seemed to offer no place for his films, some of his colleagues headed to the US for other opportunities, but Ken Loach remained true to his impulse to represent the real not the Hollywood reconstruction.
He re-emerged after a period of struggle with Hidden Agenda (1990) starring Brian Cox and Frances McDormand, a story of government duplicity and violence in Northern Ireland, it won the Jury Prize at Cannes. Then came a continuous canon of regular films that included, Land and Freedom (1995) about the Spanish Civil War, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, with Cillian Murphy in 2006 about the Irish conflict in the 1920s. Film after film that documents the rage of injustice, from a man trying to raise money for his daughter’s communion dress, or a teenager trying to raise money for a home to stories civil war and the battle against fascism.
Ken Loach’s politics are reflected in every frame and although he retired, he remains a delightfully polite but fierce critic of a society that tolerates incessant injustice imposed on those trapped by the luck of the draw and in 2016 he made I, Daniel Blake which won the BAFTA Award for the Outstanding Film of the Year.
Sorry We Missed You (2019)
I, Daniel Blake, is not his latest film, that’s Sorry We Missed You, which has been showing at Vue cinema in Stroud this week, but I, Daniel Blake, put film and its polemic back on the agenda. The film exposed the inadequacies and cruelty of the benefits system under austerity. I, Daniel Blake is as uncompromising in its representation of the individual versus the system as was Cathy Come Home back in 1966, and the very existence of both films, and all that comes between them, so far apart is an indictment on the community that allows such injustice to continue.
I've heard it said that mellowing is for cheese not for people, and it would seem that Ken Loach has not mellowed in his desire to challenge society to change the injustices it tolerates so easily. The excoriating effects of austerity have reinvigorated his film making, both as an artist who documents the real and as a supporter of the Labour Party, a Labour Party that he believes has transformed into a party that can genuinely provide the alternative that will provide change for the so many who need it.
To that end he has worked with his regular writer Paul Laverty with the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn on their political broadcasts for the election campaign; and the short film A Fork in the Road that is doing the rounds on social media and uses his work to present to the public the sense of choice that we all face this Thursday.
Later today Ken Loach is expected to be in Dursley and Stroud to meet with David Drew and Labour campaigners to explain why he thinks this choice is so important is it “I” he asks or is it “we”?
Judith Gunn is a frustrated screenwriter and the author of Dostoyevsky: A Life of Contradiction. She has two stories in the latest edition of Stroud Short Stories and is the creator of online educational content and books. She does this while tutoring students online and writing the great novel. judithgunn.com