Ken Loach makes movies to change the world.
In the course of his 30-year film career, the intense, uncompromising Loach has turned out a distinct body of work examining the social, political and sexual entanglements of the disenfranchised and the have-nots.
Now Loach unleashes one of the most ambitious works to date and also one of his best, “Land and Freedom,” an absorbing, heartbreaking work about the Spanish Civil War that won the Felix Prize for Europe’s Best Film (the second time in the last four years he was honored, following the similar acknowledgment for 1991’s “Riff Raff”). The film is now playing at the Music Box Theatre.
Constructed around the experiences of an unemployed Liverpool Marxist named David (Ian Hart, of “The Hours and Times”), who leaves home in 1936 and fights on the Aragon front with a radical collective of socialist militia members, “Land and Freedom” concentrates on the internecine war and intense factionalism that fractured the Republican forces.
“I can’t remember when I first heard about the initial facts of the civil war,” Loach said at the Cannes Film festival last May.
“But the story of the revolution within the civil war is something I read when I read George Orwell.
“One of the most important things was to celebrate the time when people took over power for themselves. If you tell that story, you have to say what happened to it and what happened to the experiment.
“Most other films (about the Spanish Civil War) have been about people who have been burned, people who have been suffering at the sharp end. They’re not political.
“Their situation is political, but they don’t have a political verse. This was a war about people with a commitment; they went to fight because of their commitment.”
The 59-year-old Loach, who was born in 1936 in Nuneaton, England, has a remarkably varied background suited to the rigorous demands of filmmaking. An Oxford-educated law student, Loach served two years in the Royal Air Force and joined the BBC in 1963.
At the BBC, Loach and his key collaborators, the producer Tony Garnett and the brilliant cinematographer Chris Menges, worked on a series of groundbreaking documentaries and television films.
Loach’s first major feature film was the 1970 “Kes,” a lyrical, funny and memorable film about a young boy’s attachment to his kestrel, a European falcon. Loach is currently completing work on a fictional film about the Nicaraguan civil war, starring Scott Glenn.
His passion and commitment for long-term change remains resolute.
“History is dynamic, history moves on,” he says. “There is always another chance sooner or later. It’s a matter of whether or not we take the opportunity again and whether we could learn from the past. The balance of power changes and evolves. Unexpected things happen. I can’t look into the future, but clearly we can’t stay as we are. We can’t stay with 20 million unemployed in Europe, an alienated younger generation and so on. Things must go on.”
