Photo: PA from Ken Loach’s final film The Old Oak
The Old Oak: ‘It’s a message of hope. It’s a message of humanity’ By Jessica Rawnsley, PA Upon witnessing the detonation of the world’s first nuclear Ken Loach’s final film,The Old Oak, has all the filmmaker’s definitive qualities: it questions assumptions, with the lens unwaveringly trained on inequality and injustice.
Set in a former mining town in England’s North East – a town forgotten and impoverished in the decades following the enforced closure of the pits – the story pivots around The Old Oak pub as it becomes the epicentre of a clash between past and present. It is the last public space standing in the village, the community hub, kept afloat by a handful of regulars.When Syrian refugees arrive and face hostility, the pub becomes contested territory. The struggling landlord and former miner, TJ Ballantyne, unwittingly finds himself at the centre of the turmoil. Can the budding friendship between TJ and Yara, a young Syrian refugee, bring the two communities together? Before they began filming, Loach and Laverty went to visit former mining towns. “I wandered around, just getting lost and talking to people,” says 66-year-old Laverty. “And what was immediately obvious was there was a sense that time was present in these villages.” Among the people he spoke to was a lady in her nineties who as a nurse had attended to men injured in the 1951 County Durham mining explosion. “And when I spoke to people like that, there was a real sense of vitality about them, of connection,” Laverty says. “And a real sense of community.
Homelessness, poverty and labour rights are key themes, as in many of his movies.
The Old Oak is in some ways the culmination of his latest body of work made in partnership with long-time collaborator, screenwriter Paul Laverty. I, Daniel Blake examined the crippling effects of austerity in Britain; Sorry We Missed You is an indictment of the precarious gig economy. “We had made two films in the North East,” the 87-year-old explains,“stories of people trapped in this fractured society. Inevitably both ended badly.Yet we had met so many strong, generous people there who respond to these dark times with courage and determination. We felt we had to make a third film that reflected that, but did not minimise the difficulties people face and what has befallen this area in the past decades.”
“But then when I wandered the rest of the village, you see young people, and she was in better shape than many of
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