Hero Worship: Ken Loach

One of the great annoyances of the pre-digital age was also its blessing: how the lack of choice about what to watch simultaneously immersed us in grand, shared storytelling, the kind that runaway capitalism has thrived on splintering over the decades. I was twelve or thirteen, staying up past my bedtime, and spending more and more time in that dark, shadowy corner of British cultural life (for a teenager at least) known as BBC2. Thatcher and Murdoch’s media legacies weren’t yet cemented. With only four channels to choose between – and desperate to see beyond the confines of a neighbourhood impoverished by slavery to the City of London and mainstream telly – I flicked over and became immersed for hours in worlds that were robustly, comprehensively alien and challenging. 

One particular film turned my sense of self and culture inside out more than any other. In my memory there’s a blur of foreign fields, poor farmers rich in dignity, war, and the film’s emotional crux – lovers tragically surrendering personal fulfillment to political necessity. (Staggering out of Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables last night as it tours the Scottish Islands, and with Thatcher’s funeral just over, I realise that this idea – the individual coming second – is still a million Cameron Mackintoshes from making any come-back). Above all though, I recall a scene, in which men and women, young and old, scholar and peasant, Glaswegians, Liverpudlians, Catalan and Eastern Europeans passionately debated what they were living and dying for. Land, and freedom. It blew my mind.

Maybe I knew then that this film (yes, Land and Freedom, about the Spanish Civil War) was directed by a man called Ken Loach. However, it took a second film at the cinema a year or so later, Carla’s Song, the first written by Loach’s now long-time screenwriter Paul Laverty, to confirm an awareness of his work. Here, another Glaswegian, played by Robert Carlyle, has his world turned inside out when he travels to Nicaragua and comes face-to-face with the infamous American-backed attack on the Sandinista uprisings. Broken in all the right places, Carlyle’s character returns to Scotland: but bringing what back with him?

As Desmond Tutu, a friend of Take One Action’s, says: “poverty, global injustice, and our separation from each other have causes which can be sung about, visualised and changed.” This idea has anchored Loach’s feature films and documentaries for nearly fifty years (on the docs, see Jamie Dunn’s interview with Loach last month). For me, though, the action is in the drama: where his characters repeatedly discover that the private security they’ve invested in is illusory, and that the true value of our lives is very often to be counted elsewhere, for good or ill: with people on the margins, near and far. These experiences and ideas (collective accountability, internationalism, social justice, underwritten by human stories you rarely glimpse in the Odeon) eventually led to my own learning journey to Sierra Leone in 2006, and the privilege of working for communities who are overturning centuries of turmoil and exploitation you can quickly trace back to British administrators and European high street diamond dealers. As the government once again explicitly links overseas aid with our trade interest, Sierra Leone’s peace seems a fragile one, but no less inspiring for that, and for the ongoing solidarity – the kind that Land and Freedom celebrates – between many westerners and their African counterparts. So inspired, I came home – to Scotland – to help set up a film festival aimed at revealing more of these shared stories.

We were chuffed to bits when Ken Loach and Paul Laverty agreed to become patrons of Take One Action in 2009, and ultimately thankful that they asked to be kept largely out of the picture so they could focus on what they do best. Loach is now 76, and still making an acclaimed new film about every 18 months with Paul Laverty and long-time producing partner Rebecca O’Brien. Their latest, a moving doc about the post-war generation, The Spirit of ‘45, has just landed on iTunes, epitomising the new landscape of choice over what to watch. Thankfully, this landscape owes as much to the increased democratisation of filmmaking as to its commercial exploitation. If we really want to recapture the spirit of ‘45, though, we must find ways to come together, face-to-face, to share and discuss the stories we’re choosing: men with women, old with young, scholar with apprentice, the banker with the activist.

But back to The Skinny’s question about ‘hero worship.’ Paul Laverty inadvertently reminded me not long ago of a line by Brecht, who I first discovered in a public library in 2000. It comes back to me now as I think about Loach’s work, about the politics of our own decade, and the battle over Scotland’s future. “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes,” which means simply this: that true freedom rests in our interdependence. Culture is what furthers our understanding of that. It should break you into pieces. Are you ready? Loach’s back-catalogue is a great place to start.