The Old Oak – exploring why empathy has been replaced with self-interest and whether communities have more to gain together than lose apart (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 29 September)

Screenwriter Paul Laverty and director Ken Loach are back with The Old Oak, the completion of a trilogy of films based in the north-east of England (I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You). The film’s title refers to the one remaining pub in a coastal village near Durham. The area is run down. Public services are strained. Richer councils in the south of England are buying up cheap properties in the area and bussing people seeking asylum to live there. The local NHS is struggling. Long term residents are non-plussed with the changes. New arrivals feel unwelcome and misunderstood. Everyone feels disenfranchised and unloved.

A family that fled the conflict in Syria and has spent years living in a refugee camp moves into the village. Their arrival is accompanied by confrontation. Pub landlord TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) uses his van to help newcomers settle into the area. Ebla Mari plays Yara, the eldest daughter of a Syrian family and a young woman whose experiences of life and loss have given her a confidence that jars with the regulars in TJ’s bar who are spoiling for a fight.

Driving into Belfast, on the way to the cinema I passed the Donegall Road grocers that was set on fire in a suspected hate crime last weekend ahead of its opening. Graffiti on the shutters reads: “Local Houses An[d] Shops Only!!” Sentiment that is studied in Loach’s latest film.

Against this backdrop of despair and frustration, The Old Oak finds parallels from the miners’ strike (1984/5) and asks whether everyone has more to gain from acts of solidarity than attacking and further fragmenting a dying community. Have the lessons of the past been forgotten? Do the lessons of the past apply to the future?

There’s nothing one dimensional about this portrayal of English nationalism, working class communities, or people seeking asylum and safety. A lot of time is given to getting under the surface of the hurts that have long been carried since the strike. Backstories are explored across key cast members. The on-screen racism stems from both acts of commission and omission. For a variety of reasons, empathy has been replaced with self-interest. Layers of hurry and poverty abound like the rings in the trunk of an old tree.

The dialogue is rich and uncompromising. At a Q&A following a Queen’s Film Theatre screening, Paul Laverty explained his research process. Casting local voices adds to the feeling of authenticity. At times, the delivery of lines is less smooth than a Hollywood blockbuster. But it works in this film’s favour as a reminder that while the plot is fictional, its genesis is in the communities being portrayed.

Hugh Odling-Smee remarked at the Q&A, there’s a complete absence of the state in the film. Authority figures are nowhere to be seen. They have retracted. We see people trying to live with hope rather than die in despair. We see women who realise that they are all hanging on by their fingertips and have more to gain together than lose apart.

No film by Loach is an easy watch. The multiple tragedies that drive the central cast are heartbreaking to watch. Recent government decisions on the fate of the HS2 railway that would have brought high speed rail services as far north as Leeds – still 80 miles short of Durham – must also be seen to play into the disconnect between London and the English regions. I suspect that Ken Loach’s film may be dismissed by some as simple moralising or as a do-gooders charter for letsgetalongism in the face of local pressures. But the realism of the voices in The Old Oak makes it hard to pretend that this is just a fictional fairytale that shouldn’t challenge how the dis-United Kingdom is operating and behaving, locally and nationally.

The Old Oak is being screened in the Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 29 September.

 

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