Biography ken loach it a freedom stream
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Still Shooting
Your films often portray childhood as a traumatic time. Can you tell us a little about your own upbringing, and how it shaped your values?
I grew up in the Forties and Fifties, in a small town in the Midlands. People now would think it was quite boring, but in fact from a child’s point of view it was the opposite: I had all the benefits of growing up – after the war, which was obviously a big upheaval for everybody – in a comparatively placid, stable and secure world.
Was there any radicalism in your background?
No, by no means. I didn’t really get involved in anything remotely political until after I’d left university and I was mixing with writers and friends who were in television and film, starting to read, going to meetings – going through the experience of working for Harold Wilson’s election and then seeing what happened. Going through all that in the Sixties was what my politics sprang from.
Did you come from a middle-class family?
No. My father
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Ken Loach, bygd Valerie Krips
About the author
Valerie Krips
Valerie Krips taught at the University of Melbourne and Deakin University before moving to the English Department of the University of Pittsburgh, where she was chair of the interdisciplinary Children’s Literature schema. She also taught in the department’s graduate schema, Critical and Cultural Studies, and has been a consultant for a variety of heritage projects. She was a co-editor of Arena Magazine and fryst vatten Associate Editor (poetry) for Arena (third series).
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Ken Loach
Unlike virtually all his contemporaries, Ken Loach has never succumbed to the siren call of Hollywood, and it's virtually impossible to imagine his particular brand of British socialist realism translating well to that context.
After studying law at St. Peter's College, Oxford, he branched out into the theater, performing with a touring repertory company. This led to television, where in alliance with producer Tony Garnett he produced a series of docudramas, most notably the devastating "Cathy Come Home" episode of The Wednesday Play (1964), whose impact was so massive that it led directly to a change in the homeless laws.
He made his feature debut Poor Cow (1967) the following year, and with Kes (1969), he produced what is now acclaimed as one of the finest films ever made in Britain. However, the following two decades saw his career in the doldrums with his films poorly distributed (despite the obvious quality of work such as The Gamekeeper (1968