Born on the 17th of June 1936, Ken Loach is a British independent film director with his film focusing on the social realism genre, with his films discussing a range of social issues such as poverty, homelessness and labour rights.
Alongside being a filmmaker he is also a social campaigner. This has gone alongside his film work his entire career, with his first feature film 'Poor Cow' from 1967 focusing on a working class women whose husband is in prison. Although, he started out with theatre and then branched out to TV and docudramas such as The Wednesday Play with the "Cathy Come Home" had such a big impact it led directly to a change in the homeless laws. It was viewed by 12 million people and was praised for hard hitting subject matter and its realistic documentary style. It was even discussed in parliament. Some other examples of Loach's work include Ladybird Ladybird which looks at a women's dispute with social services over the custody of her four children.
Loach is known for his unique style and taking risks and trying new things. He said the three films which influenced him the most, with Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves from 1948 having a particularly profound effect, with him saying that "It made me realise that cinema could be about ordinary people and their dilemmas. It wasn't a film about stars, or riches or absurd adventures". Within his films he doesn't shy away from using traditional dialect such as the use of the Yorkshire accent in Kes and The Price of Coal, the Scouse accent in The Big Flame and the Lancashire dialect in Raining Stones. When films are showcased in other English speaking countries they tend to use subtitles. When he was asked about this he said 'If you ask people to speak differently, you lose more than the voice. Everything about them changes. If I asked you not to speak with an American accent, your whole personality would change.'
Within his films he tries to give a true representation of what life is like for many people and things that many people higher up in society and part of the establishment would rather not think about. They tell stories about working class life and social injustice.
With Loach's commitment to challenging the status quo it may be unsurprising that many of his films and also his TV dramas and documentary work have come under a lot of controversy. When working on a documentary for the Save The Children fund in which he was commissioned by them to do so by them in 1969, he critiqued what he though to be their patronising attitudes to working class families in Britain and the neo-colonial approach he witnessed at a Kenyan school. It remained unshown until many years later in 1969. When working with the BBC in particular his work has come under accusation of left-wing bias and his TV dramas and documentaries going against the BBC's political partisanship. This has also been the case with ITV and Channel 4 with them shelving documentaries altogether in the case of 'A Question of Leadership' in which it was accused of an anti-government stance in 1981, shortly after the election of Margaret Thatcher. His film 'Hidden Agenda' which was about the troubles in Ireland at the time (1990), came under fire with it being accused of being IRA propaganda by Evening Standard film critic Alexander Walker when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
Despite the controversy surrounding Loach's films they have still came under critical success with them gaining positive reviews throughout, in particular in recent years I, Daniel Blake.
Ken Loach is also a supporter of the Labour Party, with him joining in the 1960s. He is a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and has even done an hour long documentary with him.
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