Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach

Ken Loach is mild-mannered and looks like a geography teacher, but for 50 years this firestarter in elbow patches has been shaking up the British film industry. With family and key collaborators, the Nuneaton-born director, now 80, reviews a prodigious career of pricked social conscience (Cathy Come Home, Ladybird Ladybird), political agitation (Hidden Agenda) and working-class isolation (evergreen, ever-heartbreaking Kes).

Aside from his unquenchable drive and battles with broadcasters, the documentary also offers surprising glimpses of a cricket lover who loves musicals (“the more camp and glossy, the better”).

It’s a measured profile, but not a hagiography. We see how Loach’s apparently inflexible principles bent enough to make commercials in the 1980s, including one for McDonald’s. And his quest for naturalism crossed a line for the moment in Kes in which schoolboys were caned on the hands.

But critics of “Red Ken” as a troublemaker tend to miss the point. As Gabriel Byrne puts it, “What they call intractable, what they call unchanging, is what makes him that powerful.”

Beyond the sheer humanity of his projects, he also gives voice to the downtrodden and the hopeless. Recalling the scene in Kes where Billy Casper tells his class how he trained a kestrel, Loach says, “I didn’t want him to learn it too word-for-word because the point of the scene is for a boy who can never string two words together to become articulate.”