The Old Oak (2024)
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Director: Ken Loach Run Time: 113 min. Release Year: 2023
Starring: Chris McGlade, Claire Rodgerson, Dave Turner, Ebla Mari, Trevor Fox
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
About the film:
World Premiere, 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
The Old Oak is the last pub standing in a once thriving mining village in northern England, a gathering space for a community that has fallen on hard times. There is growing anger, resentment, and a lack of hope among the residents, but the pub and its proprietor TJ are a fond presence to their customers.
When a group of Syrian refugees move into the floundering village, a decisive rift fueled by prejudices develops between the community and its newest inhabitants. The formation of an unexpected friendship between TJ and a young Syrian woman named Yara opens up new possibilities for the divided village in this deeply moving drama about loss, fear, and the difficulty of finding hope.
“In place of magical thinking and a happy ending, The Old Oak serves up something harder: a meditation on hope.”
—Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times
About the filmmaker:
Ken Loach is an English director whose films are considered landmarks of social realism. After graduating from St. Peter’s College in Oxford, he joined the Royal Air Force for two years before working as an actor in a handful of local theatre companies and then as a director for theBBC television. Many of his early films are known for addressing different social issues, including his debut feature Poor Cow (1967) about a working-class woman whose husband is in jail, and his follow-up feature Kes (1970) about a young bullied boy who befriends a fledgling kestrel. Kes (1970) was nominated for Best Picture at the British Academy Film Awards. Loach’s feature Hidden Agenda (1990) also received significant praise, earning the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and his later film The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. After such a long and successful career, Loach, who is 87 years old, has announced that The Old Oak (2024) will be his final film.
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