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

18 April 2024

4 min read

The bullies invoking Jesus as their best buddy

Trump and Putin's desire to be loved, admired and followed.

George Pitcher

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

A fierce looking man walks at the head of a phalanx of suited men.

Trump strides from the White House to St John's Church, 2020.

The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m not at all sure that the parents of a teenager driven to despair, or even suicide, by online trolls, or a woman in a coercive relationship, are likely to see their tormentors as victims, making a cry for help by making the lives of others intolerable.

Bullies, it is said, have invariably been bullied themselves. A popular proverb has it that bullies never prosper, a comforting canard knocked down by some comprehensive research recently from the British Cohort Study that, of 7,000 children born in 1970, it was the nastiest, most aggressive little pieces of work that did best in life by age 46.

Social insecurity may well have driven their cruel treatment of others, but financial security has been their reward. Said one of the study’s authors, there’s ‘a strong link between aggressive behaviour at school and higher earnings later in life’.

What exemplars of that might we find on the international stage? Step forward the erstwhile and very possibly future president of the United States and the great-returner president of Russia.

They’ve had all that and they want a harder drug. Like most bullies, they want to be loved by those whose attention they have won.

Bullying may be too light a term for what Donald Trump has done to countless women and business associates in his life, what Vladimir Putin has done to Ukraine and other old Soviet satellites, and what both men have done to their nations’ electoral systems.

But I want to make an armchair case for the psychological insecurity of both men. That insecurity presents itself in a rather pathetic (in the literal sense) desire to be loved, to be admired and to be followed by devoted disciples.

And what role model might they come up with for that? Why, of course, they have both invoked Jesus Christ as their best buddy, who is very much on their side politically and who is really a lot like them.

Trump has endorsed excruciating (again, literally) drawings of himself sitting in the dock at court with the Christ and has published his own $60 “Bible” (one remembers the delightful self-publicist Jonathan King launching his fictional memoir, entitled Bible Two).

Putin has claimed that he’s not a little like the Nazarene calling fishermen by the sea of Galilee, as he rallies Russian youth to resist the pernicious culture of the “Satanic” West. He casts himself, along with Jesus, as the defender of “traditional values”, though the conflation of the Christ with cultural tradition is a little awry, but never mind.

There’s pragmatic political ambition in both men for co-opting the Christ to their cause. Trump wants and needs the US Christian Right on his side for re-election. Putin is promoting a rapprochement with Russian religions and already has the Russian Orthodox Church onside for his Ukrainian escapade.

But there’s something else going on here. The armchair psychologist can identify motives at work. Both Putin and Trump want not only attention. They’ve had all that and they want a harder drug. Like most bullies, they want to be loved by those whose attention they have won.

Their problem, naturally, is that they can never make it, which can only compound their insecurity

What better figure to associate themselves with than love incarnate? A demi-god aspires to be loved as God loves and is loved. It may replace a familial love that has been missing, or it may more simply be the toxic desire to be loved by those you oppress and by one’s peers – again, the instinct of the bully.

That’s closer to admiration and has vanity at its root. Witness Putin’s faintly ridiculous bared torso astride a horse as a younger man, or Trump’s vainglorious comb-over and orange-tanned skin.

Such a shame that we have no idea how the most famous figure who ever lived, whose legacy is the largest religion on earth, actually looked. Or they might try to look like that. Because, to their minds, emulation would win similar admiration.

Finally, Trump and Putin need to be followed, like bullies need their gang. Never mind that even the most devoted disciples of Christ abandoned him to his fate in his mortal life. There’s something like 2.5 billion declared followers of him today, some two millennia later. That’s some legacy and the kind that would shore up even for deepest of their insecurities.

Their problem, naturally, is that they can never make it, which can only compound their insecurity. The nature of Christian leadership, at its source, is unreachable. He said himself that we could not follow where he was going, because it’s a form of leadership beyond human scope – self-sacrificial, infinitely humble while also divine.

That leadership was among us and we didn’t recognise it. The leaderships of Trump and Putin, even as they claim Christ-like affinity, carve recognition and to be above us. These are not men who would lay down their power, far less their lives, for their friends.

These are bullies in the playground of politics. We must pray for their souls as we condemn their actions.