Career
Loach first worked as an actor in regional theatre companies and then as a director for BBC Television. His 10 contributions to the BBC's Wednesday Play anthology series include the docudramas Up the Junction (1965), Cathy Come Home (1966) and In Two Minds (1967). They portray working-class people in conflict with the authorities above them. Three of his early plays are believed to be lost. His 1965 play Three Clear Sundays dealt with capital punishment, and was broadcast at a time when the debate was at a height in the United Kingdom. Up the Junction, adapted by Nell Dunn from her book with the assistance of Loach, deals with an illegal abortion while the leading characters in Cathy Come Home, by Jeremy Sandford, are affected by homelessness, unemployment, and the workings of Social Services. In Two Minds, written by David Mercer, concerns a young schizophrenic woman's experiences of the mental health system. Tony Garnett began to work as his producer in this period, a professional connection which would last until the end of the 1970s.
During this period, Loach also directed the absurdist comedy The End of Arthur's Marriage, about which he later said that he was "the wrong man for the job". Coinciding with his work for The Wednesday Play, Loach began to direct feature films for the cinema, with Poor Cow (1967) and Kes (1969). The latter recounts the story of a troubled boy and his kestrel, and is based on the novel A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines. The film was well received, although the use of Yorkshire dialect throughout the film restricted its distribution, with some American executives at United Artists saying that they would have found a film in Hungarian easier to understand. The British Film Institute named it No 7 in its list of best British films of the twentieth century, published in 1999.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Loach's films were less successful, often suffering from poor distribution, lack of interest and political censorship. His documentary The Save the Children Fund Film (1971) was commissioned by the charity, who subsequently disliked it so much they attempted to have the negative destroyed. It was only screened publicly for the first time on 1 September 2011, at the BFI Southbank. During the 1980s Loach concentrated on television documentaries rather than fiction, and many of these films are now difficult to access as the television companies have not released them on video or DVD. At the end of the 1980s, he directed some television advertisements for Tennent's Lager to earn money.
Days of Hope (1975) is a four-part drama for the BBC directed by Loach from scripts by dramatist Jim Allen. The first episode of the series caused considerable controversy in the British media owing to its critical depiction of the military in World War I, and particularly over a scene where conscientious objectors were tied up to stakes outside trenches in view of enemy fire after refusing to obey orders. An ex-serviceman subsequently contacted The Times newspaper with an illustration from the time of a similar scene.
Loach's documentary A Question of Leadership (1981) interviewed members of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (the main trade union for Britain's steel industry) about their 14-week strike in 1980, and recorded much criticism of the union's leadership for conceding over the issues in the strike. Subsequently, Loach made a four-part series named Questions of Leadership which subjected the leadership of other trade unions to similar scrutiny from their members, but this has never been broadcast. Frank Chapple, leader of the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union, walked out of the interview and made a complaint to the Independent Broadcasting Authority. A separate complaint was made by Terry Duffy of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union. The series was due to be broadcast during the Trades Union Congress conference in 1983, but Channel 4 decided against broadcasting the series following the complaints. Anthony Hayward claimed in 2004 that the media tycoon Robert Maxwell had put pressure on Central Television's board (Central was the successor to the original production company Associated Television), of which he had become a director, to withdraw Questions of Leadership at the time he was buying the Daily Mirror newspaper and needed the co-operation of union leaders, especially Chapple.
Which Side Are You On? (1985), about the songs and poems of the UK miners' strike, was originally due to be broadcast on The South Bank Show, but was rejected on the grounds that it was too politically unbalanced for an arts show. The documentary was eventually transmitted on Channel 4, but only after it won a prize at an Italian film festival. Three weeks after the end of the strike, the film End of the Battle ... Not the End of the War? was broadcast by Channel 4 in its Diverse Strands series. This film argued that the Conservative Party had planned the destruction of the National Union of Mineworkers' political power from the late 1970s.
In 1989, Loach directed a short documentary Time to go that called for the British Army to be withdrawn from Northern Ireland, which was broadcast in the BBC's Split Screen series. From the late 1980s, Loach directed theatrical feature films more regularly, a series of films such as Hidden Agenda (1990), dealing with the political troubles in Northern Ireland, Land and Freedom (1995), examining the Republican resistance in the Spanish Civil War, and Carla's Song (1996), which was set partially in Nicaragua. He directed the courtroom drama reconstructions in the docu-film McLibel, concerning McDonald's Restaurants v Morris & Steel, the longest libel trial in English history. Interspersed with political films were more intimate works such as Raining Stones (1993), a working-class drama concerning an unemployed man's efforts to buy a communion dress for his young daughter. On 28 May 2006, Loach won the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival for his film The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a political-historical drama about the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War during the 1920s. Like Hidden Agenda before it, The Wind That Shakes the Barley was criticised by Ruth Dudley Edwards for allegedly being too sympathetic to the Irish Republican Army and Provisional Irish Republican Army, though it would transpire that Edwards had not seen the film.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley was followed by It's a Free World... (2007), a story of one woman's attempt to establish an illegal placement service for migrant workers in London. Throughout the 2000s, Loach interspersed wider political dramas such as Bread and Roses (2000), which focused on the Los Angeles janitors strike, and Route Irish (2010), set during the Iraq occupation, with smaller examinations of personal relationships. Ae Fond Kiss... (a.k.a. Just a Kiss, 2004) explored an inter-racial love affair, Sweet Sixteen (2002) concerns a teenager's relationship with his mother and My Name Is Joe (1998) an alcoholic's struggle to stay sober. His most commercial later film is Looking for Eric (2009), featuring a depressed postman's conversations with the ex-Manchester United footballer Eric Cantona appearing as himself. The film won the Magritte Award for Best Co-Production. Although successful in Manchester, the film was a flop in many other cities, especially cities with rival football teams to Manchester United.
The Angels' Share (2012) is centered on a young Scottish troublemaker who is given a final opportunity to stay out of jail. Newcomer Paul Brannigan, then 24, from Glasgow, played the lead role. The film competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival where Loach won the Jury Prize. Jimmy's Hall (2014) was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Loach announced his retirement from film-making in 2014 but soon after restarted his career following the election of a Conservative government in the UK general election of 2015. Loach won his second Palme d'Or for I, Daniel Blake (2016). In February 2017, the film was awarded the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film. His 2019 drama Sorry We Missed You garnered positive reviews. In April 2024, Loach confirmed that The Old Oak (2023) was his last film. The film premiered at the main competition of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, receiving a ten-minute standing ovation and critical praise for its social commentary about immigrants in England.
