LAST ORDERS

THE OLD OAK Ken Loach’s final film – the tale of a Syrian refugee’s bond with a pub landlord...

Ebla Mari stars as Yara, a Syrian refugee housed with her family in a former mining town in the North East

It’s an overcast morning in June 2022 and a disused pub in the village of Murton in County Durham is a hive of activity, serving as a key location in veteran director Ken Loach’s latest – and possibly last – film, The Old Oak. Scripted by Paul Laverty (the 14th feature he has written for Loach), it concerns a group of Syrian refugees who are housed by the authorities in a former mining area in north-east England. While some of the locals are determined to welcome these newcomers, others complain that their long-neglected community can’t cope with an influx of immigrants fleeing from a war zone.

‘We all felt we had to make this film,’ explains the 87-year-old Loach. ‘We’d done two films in I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You which were about the loss of human values in how we live together and in how we treat the most vulnerable, and which show how work has become all-consuming and destroys family life. They were both quite tragic, and we wanted to find something in our spirit that we could cherish. It needed a third film.’

Today Loach is shooting sequences in both the titular pub’s bar area and function room, which the landlord T.J. Ballantyne (played by ex-fireman and trade unionist Dave Turner) has opened up to allow the Syrians and the locals to come together over lunch.

Many of the components of Loach’s directorial style, honed over a near 60-year career, are visible during Teasers’ set visit: the casting of non-professional actors; the preference for long takes; the way he stands next to the camera rather than in front of a video monitor during shooting; the time spent talking to cast members before and after takes; and the softly spoken words of encouragement and praise to the crew.

Can he, Teasers wonders, sense whether a film is working during this phase of the production? ‘Well, you have a sense of when a scene is true or not. What I tend to worry about is whether I’ve got the balance between the wider shots and the close-ups. Sometimes I have to make the scenes more concise, because I don’t want to have too many cuts, and I don’t want the dialogue to be sprawling.’

‘The film is saying we are generous, we are good neighbours, we can act collectively’

KEN LOACH

If The Old Oak really is to be Loach’s last feature film, as he’s hinted elsewhere, then it’s fitting that it embodies the socialist values that have underpinned his whole body of work. ‘We have to remember what we are capable of,’ he maintains, ‘and that we’ve had struggles where we have won, and we can maintain confidence in what we can achieve. The film is saying we are generous, we are good neighbours and we can act collectively. That’s a human and a political position.’

THE OLD OAK OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 29 SEPTEMBER.