The real hearts of oak

The power of the lens, food and hospitality drive the hope in Ken Loach’s last film. Krish Kandiah reviews The Old Oak.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A man and a woman sit in a cathedral pew and incline their heads towards each other.

Ebla Mari and Dave Turner play Yara and TJ.

BBC Film.

In the dusty back room of the rather rundown Old Oak pub in County Durham, northeast England there is a faded black and white photo. It shows the very same room packed full of hungry families sharing a community meal together. Below it is written a sign:

“When you eat together you stick together.”

Pub Landlord Tommy Joe Ballantyne explains to young Syrian refugee photographer Yara that the picture was taken by his uncle during the miner’s strike when the community made it a priority to feed each other’s children no matter what.

This is the pivotal scene in Ken Loach’s latest, and some suggest, final film: The Old Oak. The multi-award-winning director has produced another masterful piece of cinema which, although set in 2016, provides vivid social commentary on our current cost-of-living crisis and our struggling immigration and asylum system.

By setting the film in an old colliery town facing its own challenges with social deprivation, Loach allows those communities who feel left behind by the rest of the country to raise legitimate concerns about immigration. The film powerfully portrays local people expressing frustration at being used as a dumping ground by government for ex-prisoners while also feeling trapped by unemployment, falling house prices and rising costs. Into this community then arrive refugees fleeing the brutal war in Syria.

The film is not just depicting some sort of Hollywood romantic utopia. It is powerfully celebrating what is happening in communities all around the UK.

Yara arrives camera in hand, snapping photographs of her family’s arrival on a bus. They are met with hostility from the beginning. We see the conflict through the lens of Yara’s camera - black and white photographs that foreshadow the photos of the miner’s struggle she will later discover on the wall of the pub’s back room. We see another photo – the one Yara’s mother displays pride of place in the lounge – of Yara’s father who is lost in the brutal Syrian prison system. These photographs provide beautiful symbolism throughout the movie signalling the themes of solidarity and resistance.

We see in the film the power of the camera to change the way that people see their world and view others in the face of hatred. We see the power of food to unite divided communities. We see the power of hospitality in the face of hostility. We see families from both communities caught in impossible situations.

What this film does most brilliantly, in the rich dialogue which sounds less like a script and more like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, is allow the strongest arguments against refuge and asylum to be raised. Ultimately this dialogue opens the eyes of the two communities, and enables them to discover that they have so much more in common than they might have imagined.

I have witnessed these eye-opening moments connection myself. I have seen Afghans resettled to hotels find a welcome into a village community through integrated cricket matches. I have seen women with no common language forge friendships over a picnic. I have seen children change from sullen and suspicious to animated and inseparable in minutes with the help of an X-box. I have seen the beer and pub industry offer support and help to Ukrainians. I have seen churches open their doors and their hearts to Muslims from Kosovo and Syria. The film is not just depicting some sort of Hollywood romantic utopia. It is powerfully celebrating what is happening in communities all around the UK.

The mining community, that once lost jobs, financial stability and heritage, eats alongside the refugee community – those who have now lost their homes

That dusty pub back room is transformed to the bustling hub of community life once again, as families from different worlds befriend and support each other over shared meals and recognition of their common mortality and humanity. The understanding that both communities have experienced displacement has brought them together. The mining community, that once lost jobs, financial stability and heritage, eats alongside the refugee community – those who have now lost their homes, their country and their heritage.

In a beautiful moment of reconciliation in the film, the Syrian families present their new neighbours with a banner made in the style of the traditional mining banners used on gala days – the ones that took pride of place on marches just behind a brass band. The banner is inscribed in both English and Arabic with the words that have drawn the communities together: Strength, Solidarity, Resistance.

I believe the film, like the banner, offers a rallying cry to those who see it. It helps us understand two of the most marginalised communities in Britain at the moment – the impoverished towns of the North, and the refugees and asylum seekers. It challenges us to find ways to come together with empathy and hospitality. It proffers significant mutually beneficial consequences – love, joy, peace, hope, friendship, forgiveness, reconciliation - when we learn not only to live together, but to share food, time and lives together.

Column

Culture

Sport

25 July 2024

4 min read

We're pretty useless really

We all fail. Not just Southgate, Biden and Sunak.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A dejected looking football manager ponders his feet while standing beside a pitch.

Southgate contemplates.

The Book of Heroic Failures, published by Stephen Pile in 1979, records a story of the Welsh Dean of St Asaph, Daniel Price, in the late 17th century. Contemporary biographer John Aubrey noted that Price was a “mighty Pontificall proud man.”

So proud that he declined to parade on foot outside his cathedral, but rather rode a mare in full vestments, reading from the Book of Common Prayer. Aubrey with precise economy describes what happened next: “A stallion happened to break loose, and smelled the mare, and ran and leapt her, and held the reverend dean all the time so hard in his embraces, that he could not get off till the horse had done his business.”

Unsurprisingly, Aubrey records that the good Dean “would never ride in procession afterwards.” He had clearly learned a lesson in humility. And one that would not have been taught had his ride passed with pompous dignity.

A question arises, pertinent for events today, as to whether we learn more from the indignity of failure than from the fruits of success. I’d like to suggest that we do, especially about the nature of our human condition.

Humans are pretty useless really and our default position is error and falling short.

No one doubts that had England won the European Football Championship it would have been the crowning adornment to manager Gareth Southgate’s career. England failed to do that, though we failed less than any other team (Spain doesn’t count because they didn’t fail at all). Now that Southgate has resigned and has time to reflect at leisure, perhaps he will learn at least as much and possibly very much more about himself than if he had raised the trophy.

US president Joe Biden would have had an altogether greater reckoning to face if he lost the election to Donald Trump than if he won it. Now he’s quit the race, arguably he has much more to learn from reflecting on his life and achievements. The Conservative Party has many lessons to learn about its 14 years in power from its abject defeat at the polls. Indeed, many parliamentary Tories believe that defeat was a requisite event for its reformation to proceed.

None of this is to suggest that failure of itself is a virtue. Nor is it just a morality tale that enjoins us to meet triumph and disaster and “treat those two impostors just the same”. A failed marriage, or failing health, or moral failures of a wider variety, cause destructive pain and trauma.

But it is to acknowledge that failure is part of the natural human condition. We’re in the territory of a flawed, fallen humanity here, one that theologians call postlapsarian, that is fallen from an ideal of perfection as dramatically portrayed in the Garden of Eden. Humans are pretty useless really and our default position is error and falling short.

Loss of innocence, injustice and failure meet in unholy alliance at Golgotha.

This isn’t, or should not be, depressing. At least not for people of faith, because it reflects the nature of humanity. Failure, if you will, is a gift of God in a fallen creation. We learn more from our failures than our successes, which is either a biological determinism in evolution or a means through which we strive for a new perfection. There’s a version of that they may be reciting to the England football team right now.

Christian faith sometimes concentrates too often on triumph over death and the idea of a heavenly kingdom where all is well, at the expense of recognising the reality of our world in which most things are very far indeed from well.

We might recognise it in a congregational tendency to skip over Good Friday to Easter morning. If we do so, we neglect to notice what an abject failure the insurgent Jesus movement was on its short journey of break-up from Jerusalem to Calvary. It, literally, dies.

Yes, we know what happens next. Or do we? The first witnesses to it certainly struggle to explain it in a manner that we might comprehend. But, in any event, loss of innocence, injustice and failure meet in unholy alliance at Golgotha.

The theologian John Macquarrie asks what happens if we feel compelled to draw the bottom line under the cross: “Would that destroy the whole fabric of faith in Christ? I do not think so, for the two great distinctive Christian affirmations would remain untouched – God is love, and God is revealed in Jesus Christ. These two affirmations would stand even if there were no mysteries beyond Calvary.”

No, our story doesn’t end there. But we can acknowledge that this is where we live in this world, at the foot of that cross. As the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal put it, the Christ “will be in agony until the end of the world.”

Let’s not be too miserable, because we do have the “mysteries beyond Calvary”. And let’s celebrate our earthly successes. But let’s also learn to embrace our failures and receive them as a gift, from football to politics.