48 Facts About Ken Loach

1.

Kenneth Charles Loach was born on 17 June 1936 and is a British film director and screenwriter.

2.

Ken Loach holds the record for most films in the main competition at Cannes, with fifteen films.

3.

Kenneth Charles Loach was born on 17 June 1936 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the son of Vivien and John Loach.

4.

Ken Loach read law at St Peter's College, Oxford and graduated with a third-class degree.

5.

Ken Loach worked first as an actor in regional theatre companies and then as a director for BBC Television.

6.

Ken Loach concentrated on television documentaries rather than fiction during the 1980s, and many of these films are now difficult to access as the television companies have not released them on video or DVD.

7.

Subsequently, Ken Loach made a four-part series named Questions of Leadership which subjected the leadership of other trade unions to similar scrutiny from their members, but this has never been broadcast.

8.

In 1989, Ken Loach directed a short documentary Time to go that called for the British Army to be withdrawn from Northern Ireland, which was broadcast in the BBC's Split Screen series.

9.

On 28 May 2006, Ken Loach won the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival for his film The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a political-historical drama about the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War during the 1920s.

10.

The film competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival where Ken Loach won the Jury Prize.

11.

Ken Loach announced his retirement from film-making in 2014 but soon after restarted his career following the election of a Conservative government in the UK general election of 2015.

12.

Ken Loach won his second Palme d'Or for I, Daniel Blake.

13.

In May 2010, Ken Loach referred in an interview to the three films that have influenced him most: Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers.

14.

Many of Ken Loach's films include a large amount of traditional dialect, such as the Yorkshire dialect in Kes and in The Price of Coal, Cockney in Up the Junction and Poor Cow, Scouse in The Big Flame, Lancashire dialect in Raining Stones, Glaswegian in My Name Is Joe and the dialect of Greenock in Sweet Sixteen.

15.

Ken Loach was amongst the first British directors to use swearing in his films.

16.

Bindel wrote, "Ken Loach appears not to know gay people exist".

17.

Ken Loach first joined the Labour Party from the early 1960s.

18.

Ken Loach was involved in Respect - The Unity Coalition from its beginnings in January 2004, and stood for election to the European Parliament on the Respect list in 2004.

19.

When Respect split in 2007, Ken Loach identified with Respect Renewal, the faction identified with George Galloway.

20.

Together with John Pilger and Jemima Khan, Ken Loach was among the six people in court who offered surety for Julian Assange when he was arrested in London on 7 December 2010.

21.

Ken Loach supported the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition in the 2012 London Assembly election.

22.

Ken Loach gave a press conference during the launch of Left Unity's manifesto for the 2015 general election.

23.

In 2007, Ken Loach was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter calling on the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival "to honour calls for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions, by discontinuing Israeli consulate sponsorship of the LGBT film festival and not co-sponsoring events with the Israeli consulate".

24.

Ken Loach joined "54 international figures in the literary and cultural fields" in signing a letter that stated, in part, "celebrating 'Israel at 60' is tantamount to dancing on Palestinian graves to the haunting tune of lingering dispossession and multi-faceted injustice".

25.

Ken Loach was supporting a boycott of the festival called for by the PACBI campaign.

26.

Ken Loach said he had a "respectful and reasoned" conversation with event organisers, saying they should not be accepting funds from Israel.

27.

In June 2009, Ken Loach, Laverty and O'Brien withdrew their film Looking For Eric from the Melbourne International Film Festival, where the Israeli Embassy is a sponsor, after the festival declined to withdraw that sponsorship.

28.

An article in The Scotsman by Alex Massie noted that Ken Loach had not called for the same boycott of the Cannes Film Festival, where his film was in competition with some Israeli films.

29.

Ken Loach had rejoined the Labour Party by 2017, and was a member until his expulsion in the summer of 2021.

30.

In interviews in September and October 2019 Ken Loach said MPs around Corbyn had not acted as a team and that most would prefer a rightwing leader.

31.

Ken Loach said the Labour leadership had "compromised too much with the Labour right".

32.

Ken Loach accused the right of the party, including Tom Watson, of aiming to destroy the socialist programme put forward by Corbyn.

33.

Ken Loach suggested that sitting Labour MP's and councillors should reapply for their jobs before each election so that they could be judged on their record.

34.

Ken Loach demanded that Labour people make a case for socialism including "[en]hancing trade union rights, planning the economy, investing in the regions, kicking out the privatised elements of the NHS".

35.

Ken Loach considered issues such as health, schools, poverty, inequality and climate change as more important than Brexit.

36.

In November 2019, Ken Loach endorsed the Labour Party in the 2019 general election.

37.

Ken Loach argued that his expulsion was an ex post facto action as the evidence the party cited in their letter informing him of their decision dated from before the organisations he was accused of being a member of had been banned by the party.

38.

Ken Loach's expulsion was opposed by the Socialist Campaign Group but supported by the Jewish Labour Movement.

39.

At the Labour Party Conference in September 2017, Ken Loach said he had been going to Labour Party, trade union and left wing meetings for over 50 years and had never heard antisemitic or racist remarks, although such views certainly existed in society.

40.

Ken Loach was asked about a conference fringe event at which Miko Peled suggested people should be allowed to question whether the Holocaust had happened.

41.

Ken Loach was an official sponsor of the group Labour Against the Witchhunt, launched in 2017 to campaign against what it sees to be politically motivated allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party.

42.

Ken Loach has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Bath, the University of Birmingham, Staffordshire University, and Keele University.

43.

Ken Loach is an honorary fellow of his alma mater, St Peter's College, Oxford.

44.

In November 2012, Ken Loach turned down the Turin Film Festival award, upon learning that the National Museum of Cinema in Turin had outsourced cleaning and security services.

45.

Ken Loach publicly stated that his refusal to accept the award from the museum was an act of solidarity with these workers.

46.

Ken Loach's office told the Belgian De Standaard news website the comments could apply to Loach's honorary doctorate.

47.

Ken Loach is arguably the most successful director in the history of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.

48.

Ken Loach's collaborators have won awards at the festival for their work on his films: Peter Mullan won Best Actor for My Name Is Joe in 1998, and Paul Laverty won Best Screenplay for Sweet Sixteen in 2002.