The Old Oak, possibly Ken Loach’s last feature film, is playing at film festivals and on home screens across the U.S.
British director Ken Loach has for decades been a social-oriented filmmaker for the working classes. His 2023 production, The Old Oak, part of a trilogy which includes I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019), has just become available on Blu-ray and DVD through Zeitgeist Films and is streaming on Netflix. Recently, the Vermont International Film Festival screened the movie.
Written by Loach’s collaborator Paul Laverty, the story of The Old Oak begins as a busload of Syrian refugees arrive at a village near Durham in the north of England in 2016. As so many other places in that part of England, the village is in disastrous shape. The mines closed after crippling strikes that left communities ravaged both economically and psychologically. The miners of years past are bitter old men who drink by day and night. Many of the locals, the Geordies, are damaged people. So many families cannot afford to feed their children. This situation is no creative fiction on Laverty’s part.
However, the incidents in the film are not based on one true story. Seeing this movie, it’s easy to believe you are watching a replay of actual events. In truth, the film is a combination of many peoples’ experiences.
Loach’s style is realism. What you see on screen appears to be what really happened. He uses non-professional actors with great success. The leads, Dave Turner, as TJ, and Ebla Mari as Yara, have little experience in front of moving picture cameras, but you would not know it. They give powerful performances.
TJ is a decent fellow, the owner of the The Old Oak, the last remaining pub in the village. The pub is falling to shambles, but it’s the only place for the locals, particularly the ousted miners of old, to congregate for a sociable drink. This town is in decay. Properties that sold for 40,000 or more pounds (GBP) years back have currently been sold to a Cyrus-based company for 8,000 pounds (GBP) each.
The locals lives have been placed even further down “on the scrap heap.”
So… when the Syrian refugees move into those houses, it’s no surprise they are greeted with hatred, even violence. The Old Oak is a movie with a theme that lives on through the ages. Sadly. When broken people are mired in unhappiness, they find scapegoats below their level of ruin, not above. The vulnerable Syrians are met with disgust.
Yara, a refugee who does not wear Muslim headgear as the other women do, carries a camera and takes photos of the locals. This opens a few doors. When TJ and Yara team up with a few others to create an ongoing charity lunch for both the Geordie and refugee children, circumstances look up… temporarily.
The Old Oak is the kind of movie that mirrors real life. While the villagers often act with cruelty, even to each other, the movie isn’t a condemnation of the human race. There are hopeful scenes. But the scenes of kindness aren’t as convincing as the scenes of malice. Loach works in fiction in ways that blur imagination and authenticity. One only needs to look at the border situations in our own country to find truth in the threatening behavior of the locals towards the Syrians.
I do not believe that Laverty and Loach are equating the Geordies’ very serious problems with the horrific experiences of the Syrian people in their war-torn homeland and subsequent escapes from torture and death. On the other hand, within the plot of The Old Oak, we see that war isn’t the only event that can damage the human spirit. The Old Oak looks deep into that fragile human spirit.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and retired appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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