Ken Loach

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Ken Loach in Cannes , 2014

Kenneth "Ken" Loach [ ˈkɛn ˈləʊtʃ ] (born June 17, 1936 in Nuneaton , Warwickshire ) is a British film director and screenwriter . Loach became known for his naturalistic narrative style of social dramas and his commitment to socialism . With the films The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) and Ich, Daniel Blake (2016) he won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival .

life and work

Ken Loach is the son of an electrician and studied law at St Peter's College, University of Oxford . However, he decided to go on tour as an actor with a theater company and switched to television ( BBC ) in 1964 . Loach gained national attention with the televised social drama Cathy Come Home (1966). The film is about a young couple who are unemployed and homeless through no fault of their own and about the fact that the social authorities have taken away their children as a result. As a well-known, avowed Trotskyist , Loach tried in the 1970s, especially in the Thatcher era , to make work more difficult through broadcasting bans and censorship measures.

Loach did not gain recognition as a respected European filmmaker until late in his life. His films are in the tradition of Italian neorealism , which he developed into British social realism. Since the 1960s, he has made several important films that have given a precise picture of the contemporary social situation in his country. His second film, Kes (1969), for example, was about a socially disadvantaged youth with no prospects in the dreary working-class cities of Northern England . The success of Kes brought Loach international attention from the 1970s, and the film is now listed by the British Film Institute as one of the best British films of all time. Other films, such as Land and Freedom about the Spanish Civil War and Carla's Song about the Civil War in Nicaragua, testify to his interest in the Spanish-speaking area and the situation of “ illegal ” Hispanics in the USA ( Bread and Roses ) .

Ken Loach was often represented with films at the Berlinale and won various prizes there. Most recently in 2004 he received the Ecumenical Jury Prize and that of the Gilde-Filmtheater Jury for his film Just a Kiss . In 2006 Loach won the Palme d'Or at the 59th Cannes Film Festival . He received the award for the film The Wind That Shakes the Barley , which is about the Irish struggle for freedom in the 1920s.

Ken Loach

During the 2007 election campaign for the French presidency , Loach supported Olivier Besancenot , the candidate of the Trotskyist Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR, Revolutionary Communist League). In the same year he was represented with the social drama It's a Free World in the competition of the 64th Venice Film Festival .

In 2009 he was invited to the competition at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival for Looking for Eric . The film is about a soccer-loving mail carrier (played by Steve Evets ) who gets into a life crisis and is supported by the former soccer player Éric Cantona . A year later, Loach was invited to the competition there for the ninth time with Route Irish . The drama is about the British intervention in Iraq.

Loach has worked with screenwriter Paul Laverty and film editor Jonathan Morris for decades . A frequent cameraman on his productions was Barry Ackroyd . Robbie Ryan has been responsible for camera work since 2012 . Loach likes to shoot with amateur actors because he thinks their portrayal is more authentic. Today his works are produced by Rebecca O'Brien . Most recently, the film The Angels' Share (2012) was made in cooperation with Laverty and O'Brien and was shot between May and June in Glasgow and the Highlands . The focus of the social comedy is an unemployed petty criminal who has to do community service after the birth of his son and who discovers a new professional perspective while visiting a whiskey distillery . A serious fall of the director at the beginning of the shooting caused a delay of several weeks. In 2012, Loach received his eleventh invitation to compete at the Cannes Film Festival for The Angels' Share , and the film was awarded the Jury Prize.

Loach supports the anti-Semitic boycott campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) . At the Sarajevo Film Festival 2014, in view of the war in the Gaza Strip, he called for a boycott of all cultural and sporting events in the State of Israel and renewed his call for an arms embargo against Israel. In an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2014, Loach and other members of the European Film Academy pleaded for the release of the imprisoned Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov .

In 2016 he received his 13th invitation for Ich, Daniel Blake to compete at the 69th Cannes International Film Festival , where the film was awarded the Palme d'Or. The widowed carpenter Daniel Blake (played by Dave Johns ) has had a heart attack on the scaffolding and has to fight a hopeless battle against the bureaucracy of the broken-down British welfare system. In 2017 he received the Belgian Mira d'Or Lifetime Achievement Film Award .

Loach lived with his family in Bath , England for a long time . He currently resides in London , where his production company Sixteen Films is also based. The son Jim Loach , born in 1969, works as a director.

Filmography (selection)

Awards (selection)

Documentaries about Loach

  • The cinema of Ken Loach - anger, courage and humanity (OT: Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach) . Documentary, Great Britain, 2016, 90 min., Script and director: Louise Osmond, production: Sixteen Films, BBC Films, British Film Institute (BFI), German first broadcast: October 26, 2016 on arte, synopsis from ARD , video excerpt .
  • Ken Loach: Working Class Advocate. Talk, France, Germany, 2012, 43 min., Moderation: Vincent Josse, production: arte France, editing: Square , first broadcast: October 21, 2012 on arte, film information from arte ( Memento from April 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ).
  • “Whoever has money is free.” - Ken Loach and his depressing social drama about day laborers. TV reportage, Germany, 2008, 4:23 min., Production: hr , editing: ttt - title, theses, temperaments , first broadcast: November 16, 2008 in Das Erste , summary by ttt on It's a Free World .

literature

  • Jong Uk Yun: The feature films by Ken Loach. Realistic cinema perspective. Büchner-Verlag, Darmstadt 2010, ISBN 978-3-941310-10-0 .
  • The book for the film "Land and Freedom". Ken Loach's "Story from the Spanish Revolution". edition tranvía, Berlin 1996, ISBN 978-3-925867-20-0 .
  • Claudia Lillge (ed.): Ken Loach (= film concepts , vol. 13). edition text + kritik, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-86916-651-3 .

Web links

Commons : Ken Loach  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Interviews

Press article

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joachim Kurz: " I, Daniel Blake " by Ken Loach. In: kino-zeit.de , May 13, 2016.
  2. ↑ Beyond any midlife crisis. In: Süddeutsche.de , July 12, 2015.
  3. ^ Dave Calhoun: The Angels' Share. In: timeout.com , May 21, 2012, film review .
  4. ↑ Catherine Shoard: Ken Loach calls for cultural boycott of Israel. In: The Guardian . October 21, 2013, accessed October 7, 2014 .
  5. ↑ Anastassia Boutsko: Oleg Sentsov: "I am not a serf". In: Deutsche Welle Kultur. July 22, 2014, accessed July 22, 2014 .
  6. ↑ Michael Sennhauser: Review of "I, Daniel Blake". In: sennhausersfilmblog.ch , May 12, 2016, accessed on May 22, 2016.
  7. ↑ List of honorary doctorates awarded by the UWE ( memento of February 28, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on November 3, 2009
  8. ↑ List of Honorary Doctorates from the University of Bristol , accessed October 27, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Loach, Ken
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Loach, Kenneth (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British film director
DATE OF BIRTH June 17, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuneaton , Warwickshire, England