Loach on Loach

Ken Loach is one of Britain's most distinguished, and respected, film-makers, whose career embraces both film and television. His landmark TV production of Cathy Come Home caused such an outcry over the plight of the homeless that the housing charity Shelter was established in response. Loach's film work - such as Kes - is a remarkable as his television work. He makes tough, uncompromising films about a beleaguered working class, but with a poetry (as in Kes) and a humanity soaked in humour (as in Riff-Raff and Raining Stones). His work has been feted on the Continent in particular, where Riff-Raff received the Felix Award (Europe's equivalent of the Academy Award); Raining Stones won the Jury Prize at Cannes' and Land and Freedom - his film about the Spanish Civil War - won the International Critics prize at Cannes. Over the course of his career he has created a cinema of social conscience that is without peer.