Film about the Irish War of Independence wins the Palme D'Or at Cannes

[Partridge: Yes, I'm as shocked as you. Not that this won, but at this actually good write up in the *Daily Mail*. I clicked on it expecting to read a anti-Loach diatribe, and was pleasantly surprised. Perhpas it has something to do with the fact that Mail recently launched an Irish version of their paper and are 'playing to the demographics'?]

Loach in passionate and provocative mood
Daily Mail

Put Ken Loach's movie The Wind That Shakes the Barley in the column titled 'films that matter'. You have to admire Loach who has been consistent in over 40 years of making movies in standing up for what he believes in. He has never cut his cloth, to steal a phrase, to fit this season's fashions.

He has always worked outside of a studio's control zone,which has enabled him ,with his hard-working producer Rebecca O'Brien,to make pictures that are radically, socially and politically at odds with the mainstream.

Early on in The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Damien O'Donovan (a superb Cilliian Murphy) is saying his goodbyes to family and friends before setting off to England to work as a doctor.

But he witnesses a a unit of Black and Tans (ill-disciplined ex British soldiers sent to Ireland in 1920 by the British government) murder an innocent lad because he refused to speak English and would only converse in his native tongue.

http://a69.g.akamai.net/7/69/7515/v1...o/2006/258.jpg
G'wan Ken. You deserve it!

The horror of the incident convinces him to stay on and join his brother Teddy (noble Padraic Delaney),and others,including Liam Cunningham's train driver turned terrorist, in facing up to the ruthless Black and Tan squads.

They form a volunteer guerrilla army in their struggle to thwart the invaders. They want to an independent Ireland and believe it's their right to fight for it.

Violent reprisals lead to further bloody acts by both sides. The Black and Tans, a so-called peace-keeping force, committ atrocious acts ,but the Republicans employ classic guerilla tactics to propel them.

Such scenes, as shot by Loach,and his master cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, brilliantly convey the sense of desperate combat at a desperate time.

Loach and his long-time screenwriter Paul Laverty meander halfway through the film ,but it's still pure Loach, as they try and balance the arguments. Stick with it and you are rewarded.

The film-maker though has always seen the British Empire as a monument of exploitation and conquest, and it's not difficult here to see how the story in The Wind That Shakes the Barley reflects another foreign power sending in troops to an almost third-world country today.As the director noted to me Monday night after winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, 'Maybe if we start telling the truth about the past, we can start telling the truth about the present'.

The Black and Tans have become a blight on our history in Ireland and Loach wants us to understand and acknowledge that. It would be truly marvelous if the audiences that turned out for X-Men: The Last Stand would also troop in to see Loach's latest,but I know that won't happen. To entice them,Loach would have had to have turned his film into populist hack fare. He couldn't do that, it's not in his blood.

It's worth noting that the film's title comes from a Fenian folk song written by Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830-1883) that when read in full is as profoundly moving as the movie.

Here's one verse: Twas hard the woeful words to frame. To break the ties that bound us. But harder still to bear the shame. Of Foreign chains around us.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley, passionate and provocative, opens in the UK soon.

[Partridge: Interestingly, while this time around Loach was widely cheered and lauded in the winners press conference - in 1990 his film Hidden Agenda won the Cannes Special Jury Prize. He was harangued by British film critics at that press conference. The subject matter of that film was the British State's 'shoot to kill' policy in Northern Ireland. Seems atrocties 80 years ago are ok to frown upon, but not the more recent ones. I hope Ken makes a film about Iraq or Afghanistan.]

Who is that hot broad standing next to him?

Prolly just some Cannes dolly. She looks like a rabbit in the headlights.

Ken Loach on The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Socialist Worker (UK)

Director Ken Loach spoke to Tom Behan about his award winning new film The Wind That Shakes The Barley, which is about Ireland’s fight for freedomEven though Ken Loach’s new film The Wind That Shakes The Barley hasn’t yet opened in cinemas, it has already won a high profile award and created controversy. Ken Loach is on a high after winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Some elements of the British media have insinuated it was just a fluke, or that he won as a kind of “lifetime achievement award”.

This is nonsense – the jury’s decision was unanimous. Some newspapers have been far worse, and Loach is rightly livid.

Ken Loach told Socialist Worker, “The right wing has reacted hysterically. The Daily Mail has written, ‘Why does this man loathe his country so much?’

“The Times has compared me to Leni Riefenstahl – a Nazi propagandist! Such a response is crude, vicious and lying, so we’ve obviously hurt them. It’s all because they can’t stand the idea of the British Empire being questioned.

“They liked it when people went out for the ‘benefit of the poor benighted natives and brought them the Bible and British virtues’. But in reality we went out to exploit and destroy them.”

Conscious of his huge worldwide popularity, Loach remains defiant. He said, “We have a responsibility to attack the mistakes and brutalities of our own leaders, past and present.”

The Wind That Shakes The Barley is a film about the struggle for Irish independence, and it can be compared – in all senses – to Loach’s masterpiece about the Spanish Civil War, Land and Freedom.

But instead of the dust and sun of Spain, this film is set in the misty green countryside of County Cork.

Like nearly all of Ken Loach’s films, your ears work overtime in the first few minutes as you get used to the local pronunciation. The voices are soft Irish country accents.

The film opens in 1920 – two years after the Irish nationalists Sinn Fein had won a huge majority in the new Irish parliament. The only problem was that the British government wasn’t having any of it, and was sending in more troops to shore up its rule.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley shows the cruelty of war on both sides – how people are dragged into fighting a foreign army of occupation, and why such a huge commitment will not be satisfied if fundamental change is not achieved.

The film begins with the British “Black and Tans” forces raiding a farmhouse. They were named after the colour of their uniforms, and to British viewers their brutality might seem excessive.

But ask most Irish people, and they will tell you there’s no argument about this and that the British forces were absolutely barbaric.

That’s not surprising as they had virtually no local support – nobody wanted them in Ireland.

National liberation

The backbone of the movement against British occupation was made up of ordinary people. Loach’s film is sure to be attacked by “revisionists”, historians who argue that the Irish struggle was not a popular movement for national liberation.

As Loach explains, “These people basically argue that what happened during what we call the ‘War of Independence’ was an opportunity to settle old scores, on a sectarian basis.

“So we worked very closely with a historian at Cork university named Donal O’Driscoll, and many other experts. Together with the scriptwriter Paul Laverty we went back to primary sources, to eyewitness accounts, because this was all 80 years ago.”

Another group that will watch the film very closely will be the Sinn Fein leadership, who formally stand in the tradition of the IRA of the 1920s.

“It’s going to be very interesting to see their reaction,” Loach ponders. “I remember when we made Carla’s Song, a film about the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, we showed it to a group of leading Sandinista politicians. Their criticism was that it was too pro-Sandinista!

“At the end of the day I believe in ‘no justice, no peace’ – therefore you need to come to terms with that pivotal moment, when Ireland nearly got full independence, when the people voted overwhelmingly for total independence – and the British denied that democratic mandate.

“So they sent in the troops, brutalised the population, and then the resistance was born. On both sides of the water, we need to come to terms with this.

“You have to deal with the substance of what happened – but they try to cover things up, and for 80 years trying to patch these things over simply hasn’t worked.”

Damien (Cillian Murphy), one of the main characters in The Wind That Shakes The Barley, is a recently graduated medical student. He decides to join his local IRA “flying column” after seeing too much Black and Tan violence.

He had come across the writings of the great socialist James Connolly at university, after Connolly had been executed by the British following the 1916 Easter Rising. So when Damien first encountered Connolly, it was in a context of “all talk”.

Another theme that emerges repeatedly in the film is the scale of local support, without which no guerrilla movement can exist. Women were in the forefront, carrying messages and sometimes weapons.

Farmhouses were a vital base for food and rest for IRA volunteers on active service. Trade unions were active in the struggle too, refusing to transport British soldiers and equipment.

One of the main characters, Dan, became politicised in a huge strike in Dublin in 1913. He is a railway driver who had been involved in the 1913 Dublin lockout and James Connolly’s Citizen Army. Loach explains how somebody who represents this kind of politics was integrated into the film:

“The Connolly strand wasn’t that strong in the south west, in the rural areas, but it was a significant element in the republican movement as a whole – that’s why we wanted to have a character such as Dan.

“But it would have been wrong for him to dominate more than he does. He connects with Damien in a prison cell – while Damien has only had these ideas in his head, Dan has lived them.”

Betrayed

Although the film contains a lot of violence, unlike most Hollywood films none of it is glorified. At one point local activists realise who has betrayed them – Chris, a young part time member of the flying column.

The order comes through to execute him. Many of the group don’t want to kill somebody so young, but a quieter member starts to speak up, voicing the terrible logic of guerrilla warfare, “I’m sorry, lads, but this is war. What are we doing here? It’s a war.”

Damien then volunteers to kill Chris, who he has known since he was a young boy. Later he admits to his girlfriend, “I can’t feel anything anymore.”

Chris is being executed alongside a local landlord.

After having told the volunteers to tell his mother he loves her, Chris suddenly blurts out his final request a split second before they fire, “Don’t bury me next to him!” He accepts his fate as a traitor, but still doesn’t want to be identified with the enemy.

Many urban socialists were perhaps surprised by who was doing the fighting. These were country people, often referred to as “bogmen”. County Cork is next to County Kerry, and people from Kerry are often the butt of Dubliners’ jokes for their apparent stupidity.

The film shows how local people were forced to fight fire with fire. After one attack on a British patrol, an IRA commander tells his troops, “If they bring their savagery over here, we will meet it with a savagery of our own.”

This sustained military resistance forced the British government to negotiate – Michael Collins and other Republican leaders went to London and signed a treaty.

Back in Cork, members of the local flying column are in the cinema watching a silent newsreel.

People groan when the king of Britain comes on screen, and start cheering when the subtitled screen announces independence has been won.

The pianist strikes up “The Rising of the Moon” – an old nationalist song – but this is drowned out by uproar as the next subtitles scroll before them.

The Irish parliament will have to swear allegiance to the British crown. And then worst of all, in the north, six of Ireland’s 32 counties will have no independence at all.

The majority of the IRA want to accept the treaty because they think it’s the best they can get, and the British threaten even more violence if they don’t sign.

But there’s also another reason, played out in a key scene – the local leadership are cutting deals with local landlords who have financed some of the weapons that have been used.

Dominate

In other words, the Sinn Fein majority were happy for Irish landlords to continue to dominate poor Irish peasants, the backbone of the resistance.

Discussions about curbing landlords’ power and eliminating poverty wasn’t something abstract – poverty was so extreme it was virtually a matter of life or death.

In this period Ireland had the highest infant mortality rate in Europe. In 1921, a quarter of all Dublin families lived in a single room.

As the argument over the treaty rages back and forth among the volunteers, one of the anti-treaty activists says, “We didn’t go through all this to just change the colour of the flag.”

And another volunteer, Congo, who was quiet at the start, finally speaks up. His words are stilted. He is grappling with the notion of something totally new being created.

He says, “Lads, we have freedom within our grasp. We’re that close. It’s just one inch but it’s still out of reach. And if we stop now, we will never again… regain the power that I can feel in this room today. And if we stop short now, never in our lifetime… will we see that energy again. Ever!”

The IRA splits, with the church supporting the treaty. People start thinking the unthinkable, and even interrupt a priest in the middle of his church sermon.

But the British soldiers march out. The anti-treaty volunteers look at their old commander putting on the military uniform of the new Irish Free State and call him “gombeen man” (a term of abuse for a rural landlord).

As these new forces march past them they mutter, “Send out the Black and Tans – bring in the Green and Tans.”

The last quarter of the film deals with the civil war between these two warring Republican camps, which the British had managed to divide. This is something Loach shows in all its human tragedy.

But by the end of the film you can’t help being reminded of the British army in Iraq today, and Loach is the first to admit this.

He said, “I think what happened in Ireland is such a classic story of a fight for independence, to establish a democratic mandate and to resist an occupying army.

“Yet it was also a fight for a country with a new social structure.

“The British army in Ireland during 1920-21 did what armies of occupation do the world over – adopt a racist attitude towards the people they are attacking and occupying.

“They destroy people’s houses, engage in acts of brutality and generally oppress the people – and in Iraq that’s exactly what the British army is doing.

“In spite of the suffering depicted, the fact still remains that the British marched out of Ireland. There is an element of hope in that.”

The Wind That Shakes The Barley is released on Friday 23 June.

Hear Ken Loach talk about the Spanish Civil War and his film Land and Freedom at Marxism 2006, a five day political festival from 6-10 July, central London. Go to www.marxism2006.org.uk


[Partridge: Land & Freedom (loosely based on Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia') is one of the best films I have ever seen in my life]

Loach Hits Back
Daily Ireland

Director of Tan War film The Wind that Shakes the Barley rejects British tabloid ‘vitriol’ against his work saying ‘partition has failed’ and the unionist veto should be replaced ‘by a way of unravelling the sad legacy of the 1921 treaty’.

The acclaimed film-maker Ken Loach yesterday hit back at British press criticism of his award-winning film on the Tan War.

Speaking exclusively to Daily Ireland last night, the 69-year-old director said some of the criticism had been of an “amazingly vitriolic and personal nature”.

He said it had been movitated by a “deep-seated imperialist guilt” over the partition of Ireland and the subsequent years of conflict that had resulted.
Mr Loach said the British government should now acknowledge that “partition had failed”. He said the “unionist veto” on political progress should be replaced by a way of “unravelling the sad legacy of the 1921 Treaty.”

The Wind That Shakes the Barley won the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the Cannes film festival last Sunday but was savaged by several tabloid newspapers this week. Mr Loach was accused of propagating anti-British sentiment.

The film depicts events during the IRA’s guerrilla campaign against British rule during the 1920s. It stars Cillian Murphy as an Irish medical student who takes up arms against a reign of terror by the Black and Tans, the notorious auxiliary force sent in to quell calls for independence.

On Sunday, a nine-person jury at Cannes, headed by the Chinese director Wong Kar-wai, returned a unanimous decision to give the top award to the director, who had previously been nominated on seven occasions.

Mr Loach told guests at the gala closing ceremony: “Our film, we hope, is about the British confronting their imperialist history and maybe if we tell the truth about the past, we will have the truth about the present.”
Mr Loach also drew parallels between what was depicted in the film and the current occupation of Iraq.

A series of vitriolic attacks on the director by several right-wing tabloids followed. The Sun said the film had a plot “designed to drag the reputation of our nation through the mud”.

“It portrays British soldiers as trigger-happy mercenaries hooked on torture, burning cottages for kicks and using pliers to rip out the toenails of innocent Irish victims.

“At the same time, cold-blooded republican butchers star as figures of heroic bravery,” wrote columnist Harry MacAdam.

The Independent said the film’s graphic depiction of the Black and Tans had “come across like a recruiting campaign for the IRA”.

Ruth Dudley Edwards, writing in the Daily Mail, accused the director of contriving to portray the “British as sadists and the Irish as romantic, idealistic resistance fighters” to suit a political agenda.

Mr Loach said the criticism had not once challenged the veracity of the film.
“Not one of the criticisms managed to directly challenge the script’s content. It was instead based on vitriolic personal attacks and inaccuracies,” the director said.

“Ruth Dudley Edwards’ piece, in particular, was amazing. I never, as she claimed, had four films banned by the BBC or was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, for example.”

Mr Loach said the press coverage had been a “knee-jerk reaction” by those who were incapable of facing Britain’s colonial past and who felt threatened by being confronted with aspects of their own history.

“Exposing colonialism in its brutality is something the British ruling class react violently against. Guilt is embedded deeply in the consciousness of the political class,” Mr Loach said.

He added that Ireland held a special place among the colonies because society was still living with the legacy of colonialism and this also accounted for the media reaction.

“People can only understand the conflict in the North by understanding its roots in the Treaty. Once people do, it makes it harder for others to represent the Irish conflict as a case of ‘the Irish just can’t get along’. It may account therefore for some of the press hostility,” he said.

When asked whether a British prime minister should publicly renounce, on behalf of the government, Britain’s colonial history as being wrong in principle, Mr Loach replied: “They are incapable of doing so. Imperialism is in their blood and their words do not mean much of anything.

“They will not because they are pursuing an imperialist agenda in Iraq and elsewhere. To acknowledge they were wrong in the past would be to acknowledge that they are wrong now.”

However, the film director said the British government should openly acknowledge the failure of partition and work towards dismantling the unionist political veto over change in Ireland. “Partition has been a failure. It has resulted in decades of political strife and death. It created a failed statelet.

“The British government should publicly acknowledge this and work towards unravelling the mess it created. The unionist veto on change must be removed. This must be achieved reasonably but certainly it must begin with an acceptance that partition has failed,” he said.

If we knew more about Ireland, we might never have invaded Iraq
George Monbiot - The Guardian

Loach's film about the Irish independence war is being rubbished because it tells the other side of the occupation story.

That they have not seen his film is no impediment. That it has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes only quickens their desire for reprisals. Ken Loach has been placed in preventive detention and is having his fingernails pulled out.In the Times, Tim Luckhurst compares him - unfavourably - to Leni Riefenstahl. His new film is a "poisonously anti-British corruption of the history of the war of Irish independence ... The Wind That Shakes the Barley is not just wrong. It infantilises its subject matter and reawakens ancient feuds." I checked with the production company. The film has not yet been released. They can find no record that Luckhurst has attended a screening - and last night he refused to discuss the matter.

At least Simon Heffer, writing in the Telegraph, admits he doesn't know what he's talking about. Loach, he says, "hates this country, yet leeches off it, using public funds to make his repulsive films. And no, I haven't seen it, any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was." The Sun says it's "a brutally anti-British film ... designed to drag the reputation of our nation through the mud". Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Daily Mail pronounced it "old-fashioned propaganda" and "a melange of half-truths". She hasn't seen the film either. Nor, it seems, has Michael Gove, who told his readers in the Times that it helps to "legitimise the actions of gangsters".

Are these people claiming that events of the kind Loach portrays did not happen? Reprisals by members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Auxiliary division are documented by historians of all political stripes. During the period the film covers (1920-21), policemen visited homes in places such as Thurles, Cork, Upperchurch and Galway and shot or bayoneted their unarmed inhabitants. Nor does any historian deny that they fired into crowds or threw grenades or beat people up in the streets or set fire to homes and businesses in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Bantry, Kilmallock, Balbriggan, Miltown Malbay, Lahinch, Ennistymon, Trim and other towns. Nor can the fact that the constabulary tortured and killed some of its prisoners be seriously disputed.

It is also clear that some of these attacks were sanctioned by senior officers and politicians. In June 1920, in the presence of the commander of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the force's divisional commissioner in Munster (Colonel GB Smyth) told his men: "You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent people may be shot but that cannot be helped ... The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you no policeman will get in trouble for shooting any man." He advised that "when civilians are seen approaching, shout "Hands up!" Should the order be not immediately obeyed, shoot and shoot with effect. If the persons approaching carry their hands in their pockets, or are in any way suspicious looking, shoot them down." Sir Henry Wilson, the director of operations in the War Office, complained that he had warned his minister - Winston Churchill - that "indiscriminate reprisals will play the devil in Ireland, but he won't listen or agree". There was even a policy of "official reprisals": the homes of people who lived close to the scene of an ambush and had failed to warn the authorities could be legally destroyed.

Loach's hero, Damien, as many Irishmen were, is radicalised by a raid by the Black and Tans, who were members of the constabulary recruited from outside Ireland. As the film shows, they were responsible for much of the police brutality. The historian Robert Kee, who is a fierce critic of the IRA, remarks that while the police were at first slow to retaliate, their vengeance - exercised against innocent people - "further consolidated national feeling in Ireland. It made the Irish people feel more and more in sympathy with fighting men of their own." The fighter Edward MacLysaght recorded that "what probably drove a peacefully inclined man like myself into rebellion was the British attitude towards us: the assumption that the whole lot of us were a pack of murdering corner boys".

There is no question that the IRA also killed ruthlessly - not just police and soldiers but also people they deemed to be informers and collaborators. But Loach shows this too. (I have seen the film.) The press hates him because he admits that the people who committed these acts were not evil automata, but human beings capable of grief, anger, love and pity. So too, of course, were the British forces, whose humanity is always emphasised by the newspapers. Ken's crime is to have told the other side of the story.

The other side - whether it concerns Ireland, India, Kenya or Malaya - is always inadmissable. The torture and killing of the colonised is ignored or excused, while their violent responses to occupation are never forgotten. The only aggressors permitted to exist are those who fight back.

Does it matter what people say about a conflict that took place 85 years ago? It does. For the same one-sided story is being told about the occupation of Iraq. The execution of 24 civilians in Haditha allegedly carried out by US marines in November is being discussed as a disgraceful anomaly: the work of a few "bad apples" or "rogue elements". Donald Rumsfeld claims "we know that 99.9% of our forces conduct themselves in an exemplary manner", and most of the press seems to agree. But if it chose to look, it would find evidence of scores of such massacres.

In March Jody Casey, a US veteran of the war in Iraq, told Newsnight that when insurgents have let off a bomb, "you just zap any farmer that is close to you ... when we first got down there, you could basically kill whoever you wanted, it was that easy". On Sunday another veteran told the Observer that cold-blooded killings by US forces "are widespread. This is the norm. These are not the exceptions." There is powerful evidence to suggest that US soldiers tied up and executed 11 people - again including small children - in Ishaqi in March. Iraqi officers say that US troops executed two women and a mentally handicapped man in a house in Samarra last month. In 2004, US forces are alleged to have bombed a wedding party at Makr al-Deeb and then shot the survivors, killing 42 people. No one has any idea what happened in Falluja, as the destruction of the city and its remaining inhabitants was so thorough.

Even the Iraqi prime minister, who depends on coalition troops for his protection, complained last week that their attacks on civilians are a "regular occurrence ... They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion." But like the Black and Tans the US troops have little fear of investigation or punishment.

Why should we be surprised by these events? This is what happens when one country occupies another. When troops are far away from home, exercising power over people that they don't understand, knowing that the population harbours those who would kill them if they could, their anger and fear and frustration turns into a hatred of all "micks" or "gooks" or "hajjis". Occupations brutalise both the occupiers and the occupied. It is our refusal to learn that lesson which allows new colonial adventures to take place. If we knew more about Ireland, the invasion of Iraq might never have happened.