Between Hope and Heartbreak: Ken Loach’s The Old Oak

By Lucy Evans

Ken Loach’s latest film, The Old Oak, which some surmise (at Loach’s impressive age of eighty-seven) to be his final film, is both heart-wrenching and heart-warming, leaving the viewer with a faith in humanity at odds with the wretchedness of the characters’ circumstances in the film. In this way, the film has a miraculously redemptive quality which has been criticized by some as offering a fairy tale-like ending apparently inconsistent with Loach’s usual style of gritty social realism. Loach, however, sees his own work in this film as providing a dose of essential optimism following I, Daniel Blake in 2016 and Sorry We Missed You in 2019 – the first two of Loach’s northeastern England “trilogy”, with the first two examining austerity and gig culture in the United Kingdom respectively. 

The Old Oak is structured around parallel stories of suffering – those of Syrian refugees and those of the working-class of northeastern England, exploring what happens in the space between these two communities when they are brought together through the arrival of a group of Syrian refugees into a small, former-mining town in rural north-east England. The film draws attention to the way in which cheap housing is utilized for the accommodation of refugees in northern England and Scotland, despite the lack of support and infrastructure in place for these people, and indeed for the locals, and how the inhabitants of these areas can therefore feel “dumped upon”. The film humanizes this post-industrial, small-town, English demographic, avoiding stereotypes and instead examining, with empathy, how disenfranchised and hopeless people in these communities have become following economic decline and years of austerity, and how this feeling of abandonment and desperation breeds racism, xenophobia and far-right politics.  

The film’s study of these two communities side by side certainly does not equate war-torn Syria with poverty-stricken England, but instead explores the friction in the space between these two groups and how, despite the racism rampant amongst the locals, how the community finds hope. As the film’s screenwriter, Paul Laverty, explains: the purpose of the film is to examine the notion of hope (especially as inherently political) - a topic which has only previously acted as subtext in Loach’s films. Moreover, the suffering in the film is paired with the promise of compassion, solidarity and understanding between the two communities – a promise surprisingly made manifest by the end of the film. 

The title ofThe Old Oak refers to the local pub in the film – a pub which exists as the last public space in the community and a metonymic symbol for mining-era solidarity and a shared sense of identity based on the mining strikes of 1984. Yara (Ebla Mari) is a young Syrian woman arriving in the town with her mother and siblings. The family are fleeing the Assad regime without their father, who has been imprisoned in one cell with hundreds of others. Amongst the aggressive atmosphere on the Syrian refugees arrival, two individuals welcome the group kindly: TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) and Laura (Claire Rodgerson). A friendship forms between Ballantyne – the downtrodden owner of The Old Oak pub – and Yara, with the two forming an unlikely team and together beginning an initiative to feed local families in the backroom of the pub. The optimism brought about by this new community-building initiative is soon interrupted as the pub’s dire state of disrepair threatens to bring an end to this spirit of hope and solidarity.  

[Figure 1] Joss Barratt, The Old Oak, 2023. 

The two communities in the film: the grief-stricken and vulnerable Syrian refugees and the disenfranchised, working-class Britons show signs of coming together at the end of the film, in a redemptive arc where the suffering of the poverty-stricken locals is recognized by the compassionate Yara, who decides to take action and bring the community together through shared meals, recalling Ballantyne’s mother’s words that, ‘when you eat together, you stick together’: words that represent the solidarity of the 1984 miners’ strike in an echo of historical circumstances for the locals. 

Loach’s starkly realist film is firmly grounded in left-wing politics, and veers at times towards a documentary-style mode of storytelling, whereby the events unfolding are so heavily enmeshed in sociopolitical and economic concerns that the viewer could easily forget that, on some level at least, this is a work of fiction. I draw attention to this point partly as a reference to Loach’s working method and his use of untrained actors in his films, as is the case with Dave Turner as TJ Ballantyne in the film. Turner was a firefighter for thirty years and met Loach when he featured in I, Daniel Blake. Indeed, many of the actors in this film are from Syria and the north-east of England (and Surrey) and Loach’s process involved gathering real people’s stories and endeavouring to include them in the film. Amna Al Ali, for example, who plays Yara’s mother Fatima, left Syria and arrived in the UK with her family in 2008. She was invited to be a part of the film and, after personally meeting Ken Loach, decided to be involved. Since 2011, over half of Syria’s pre-war population of twenty-two million has been forced to flee their homes. Al Ali has spoken of the importance of the film in light of how many people in Britain do not know what is happening in Syria.  

[Figure 2] Joss Barratt, The Old Oak, 2023. 

Significantly, the New Picture House in St Andrews is currently in a very vulnerable position, being threatened by proposed plans by Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods to redevelop it into a luxury golf sports bar for wealthy tourists. The cinema has been part of the heritage of St Andrews for over 100 years, and is a vital intellectual, cultural, and artistic centre  for the town, the inhabitants of the Fife area and the students. I spoke to a member of staff at the cinema who explained that the cinema would not be in this position if more people were coming, and that the pandemic had changed the habits of filmgoers, who, combined with the cost-of-living crisis, are less likely than ever to come out to the cinema. Indeed, the cinema was nearly empty during the screening of The Old Oak, although a couple of viewers had travelled through the storm from Dundee to see the film – a fact which pays tribute to the importance of the place and the value of seeing counterculture films like this one, which is only being shown on a one-off basis. So, make use of the cinema if you feel you can, and please sign the petition against its potential closure.

The Old Oak could not be more timely or relevant following recent events and the multiple conflicts in the world today. What the film does so well, is untangle complex myths and stereotypes in order to humanize its characters, breaking down the binary of “them” and “us” and heroes and villains to understand people as people and the ways in which they do their best to survive. 

 
HASTA