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Drama 113 min
Rotten Tomatoes82%Metacritic69IMDb
It's not where you're from, it's what you bring.
A pub landlord in a previously thriving mining community struggles to hold onto his pub. Meanwhile, tensions rise in the town when Syrian refugees are placed in the empty houses in the community.
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Prestige, contemplative, character-led and earnest.
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Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Taste Buds's numbers.
**The Old Oak (2023)** _Directed by Ken Loach_ Unlike most directors, Ken Loach's films are rarely character or narratively driven; he's the master, maybe the creator, of emotionally driven film. Plot is secondary to feeling, structure is secondary to truth. And one thing is absolutely certain: no one leaves a Ken Loach and Paul Laverty film and forgets about it. They always touch the heart. The Old Oak is no different. Set in a dying former mining town in Northern England, the film follows T.J. Ballantyne (Dave Turner), who runs The Old Oak, the last pub standing, the only remaining public space for a community that's fallen on hard times. When Syrian refugees fleeing war are resettled in the town, tensions erupt. The locals, already decimated by deindustrialization and austerity, see the refugees as one more indignity, one more thing taken from them. The refugees, traumatized by war and displacement, find themselves unwelcome in a place that was supposed to be safety. Typically Loach, the people in the movie were mostly not actors, including the leads. Dave Turner was a firefighter who had done a couple of roles previously for Loach. He won an award for his performance. Ebla Mari
Read the whole review on TMDBA lack of familiarity can produce so many needless problems, especially when it involves individuals about whom we know little or nothing. That lack of understanding can consequently yield issues that plainly aren’t warranted and, more importantly, can be easily dispensed with by simply taking the time to find common ground. Such is the case in what is said to be the final film from legendary director Ken Loach, who tells the story of a group of Syrian refugees who relocate and settle in an economically depressed former coal mining town in northern England. The locals, who themselves are struggling to get by, are far from welcoming to the new arrivals, who have essentially lost everything and are merely looking for a place to start over. In many respects, both constituencies have much in common, but their unfamiliarity with one another gets in the way, leading to friction between them, especially on the part of the town’s long-term residents, who feel they’re being crowded out and left behind. But hope is not lost, thanks to the efforts of the owner (Dave Turner) of the community’s principal local meeting place, a rundown pub called The Old Oak. He befriends one of the new arrivals
Read the whole review on TMDBSet in a rapidly fading Northern English mining town, this tells the tale of an attempt to integrate some Syrian refugees fleeing the terror in their own country into a community that it still reeling from the systematic closure of their own livelihoods. Much of the story is based around the run-down "Old Oak" boozer which is run by the relatively open-minded "TJ" (Trevor Fox) who is pretty much a lone voice when it comes to welcoming these strangers to a place that's been devoid of investment - and hope - for many a year. Most of the locals see them fed and housed and, frankly, they resent it. Homes that they bought many years ago are now worth 20% of their former value, people and their families are trapped and their traditions and culture is dying. It's keen photographer "Tania" (Debbie Honeywood) who tries to bridge the cultural gap between the two peoples and eventually finds some like-minded folk who start to resurrect some of the practical solutions to the problems that this area faced during the turbulence of the miners' strikes of the 1980s. Unlike many of Ken Loach's other films, this is not an overtly political (anti-Thatcherite) statement. It's about the decline of a wa
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