Prague film festival honors icon of independent British and European cinema

Few directors have been as productive and doggedly independent as Ken Loach, the father of British social realism who, throughout a career spanning over half a century, has given a kind and powerful voice to the destitute while tackling head-on the injustices of our times.

But the filmmaker, who will celebrate his 88th birthday next month and has commonly found more receptive audiences in mainland Europe than in his native England, remains little-known among the Czech public.

“His work can teach Czech audiences and filmmakers how to approach the lives we’d rather look away from – and that even social realism can offer moments of beauty and hope”, the organizers of The World According to Ken Loach festival say.

With more than a dozen screenings of eight of his most memorable movies scheduled over the coming weekend, the special cinema fest will highlight Loach’s unique brand of British social realism proving that films about working class struggles don’t have to be drab and dreary, overly moralistic, or downright demoralizing.

In the right hands, they can also be “funny and lively and invigorating, and warm and generous and full of good things,” argued the veteran director, whose tender and humanistic approach to his subject matter and protagonists consistently complements the seriousness of the topic.

A former law student at Oxford University hailing from a small industrial city in central England, Loach started his career in theatre and television, before making his feature film debut ‘Poor Cow’ in 1967, followed a couple of years later by the acclaimed ‘Kes’.

After his noted entry into British cinema of the late 60’s, two long decades of struggle followed, until his resurgence and comeback at the forefront of European filmmaking in the 1990’s with such movies as Hidden Agenda (1990) and Raining Stones (1993) – both winners of the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival – or his Spanish Civil War drama Land of Freedom (1995).

“Hollywood is a deeply unattractive place; why go and swim in a sea with sharks if you can bathe somewhere else? When you look at the European directors who have gone there, their work is always, to my mind, invariably better in Europe. Look at Miloš Forman, whose Czech films were inspirational for us. I only feel able to say that I don’t care for his Hollywood films so much because I like his early films so much”.

He's never stopped since, reaching critical and gradual popular acclaim across Europe and becoming one of the handful of filmmakers winning the Cannes Palme d’Or twice in his lifetime: for his Irish War of Independence drama ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ (2006) and, a decade later, for what probably remains to this day his most famous film ‘I, Daniel Blake’ (2016), looking at the Kafkaesque ordeal of a 59-year-old carpenter against the malicious forces of England’s social benefits bureaucratic machine.

Setting up a Ken Loach film cycle in Prague is also far from fortuitous considering the filmmaker’s longstanding relationship with Czech cinema and the significant influence played by the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960’s – especially the films of Miloš Forman – on his own craft.

“I like the [Czech] 1960’s New Wave so much that I would even take those films to a desert island,” Loach revealed a few years ago as he visited the Czech Republic. “They taught me that it is necessary to be true to myself, that the simpler the truth is told, the better.”

Loach’s love for Czech cinema did not go unreciprocated, nurturing a mutual admiration that goes back decades to his very beginnings as a filmmaker.

Carol White, the leading actress in his debut feature Poor Cow, received the top award at the 1968 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), with the movie itself receiving the Special Jury Prize.

Two years later, Loach travelled to the western Bohemian spa town to pick up the festival’s top prize for Kes, widely considered as one of the best British movies of the 20th century, and was again back in Karlovy Vary in 1992 for one of its first post-Velvet Revolution editions.

Which all leads up to 2017, when Loach was welcomed as one of the Karlovy Vary Festival’s top guests of honor to be awarded the Crystal Globe for his Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema alongside longtime friend and screenwriter Paul Laverty – who will himself take part in an online Q&A on May 9 following the screening of their latest collaboration, The Old Oak, which was released last year.

“Ken Loach is not as famous in the Czech Republic as he deserves,” says Dáša Sephton, projects manager at the British Council Czech Republic, for whom this movie cycle will be an opportunity to discover the few Loach titles she doesn’t know yet including The Old Oak and his famous comedy Looking for Eric.

“The British Council is pleased to be a partner of this mini film-fest,” she tells Expats.cz. “I like his films very much. They are really clever and powerful, and his stories strong and credible.”