Social Realist films normally represent true-to-life characters and locations. It refers to films with the serious representation and exploration of political and social issues. The lighting is normally ‘naturalistic’, which means it does not use lenses or soft lighting. The common themes of these films are social injustice, racial injustice, economic hardship and the working class as heroes. Social Realist films originate in the 1950s/1960s but, in terms of their form and style, were influenced by the British documentary tradition of the 1930s, popularised by the GPO Film Unit (Nightmail) who ultimately became the Crown Film Unit at the start of WW2. In the 1960s, social realist films became critically and commercially successful and benefitted from the fact that television was only a feature in some middle-class households, people flocked to the cinema to see films like Billy Liar (1953), Cosh Boy (1953), Room at the Top (1958), This Sporting Life (1963), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Kathy Come Home (1966).
Examples of directors who work within this genre are Ken Loach, Stephen Frears, and Shane Meadows. These are among the directors who have relentlessly examined injustice and inequality in their films. For Ken Loach, his socially critical directing style and socialist ideals are evident in his film treatment of social issues such as poverty (Poor Cow, 1967), homelessness (Cathy Come Home, 1966) and labour rights (Riff-Raff, 1991, and The Navigators, 2001).