Ken Loach Talks Country And Freedom As Spanish War Film Hits Cannes

INTERMEDIATE: Bafta and Palme d’Or-winning director Ken Loach and producer Rebecca O’Brien are in Cannes for tonight’s Cinéma de Plage screening of the updated 4K version of the Spanish Civil War drama Earth and Freedom which was first shown at the festival in competition in 1995.

The test came just two months before the 90th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War on July 17, 1936, where some 500,000 would die, and many would flee the country.

Speaking to Deadline before the screening, Loach says the conflict still applies to the Left to this day as the first international battle against fascism.

He added that he had permanent lessons about the dangers of fighting and the determination of the last power to eliminate socialist ideas, as evidenced by the non-interference stance of the US and the UK, which he said was a form of support for Franco.

In Earth and FreedomIan Hart stars as David Carr, an unemployed Liverpool man who goes to Spain in 1936 to help fight Franco’s Nationalists. Instead of joining the Stalinist International Brigade, he ends up joining the Trotskyist splinter group, the POUM.

She is joined in the cast by Rosana Pastor, Icíar Bollaín and Tom Gilroy among many others, as well as Cannes 2026 jury member Paul Laverty in a minor role.

The film caused a stir when it premiered at Cannes for its examination of Communist-Leftist sections on the Republican side, with commentators suggesting at the time that Loach was reopening a deep, unspoken wound.

“The Communist Party’s attack on the Left was a story that had not been talked about. The story of leftist resistance to the fascists was banned by the Communist Party but the revolutionaries, the anarchists and the POUM, which is what George Orwell belonged to, that story was not told and it was very damaging,” Loach told Deadline.

He adds: “Telling that story was unusual and a very good, amazing experience because the Spanish youth did not know the story at all, they do not know their own history.”

Jim Allen, who used to work with Loach on The Hidden Agenda again Collected Seedswrote the screenplay.

“He was a wonderful writer, a brilliant, hard-working man who learned his politics first hand,” Loach said. “He worked in the mine, he worked on the docks, he worked in the building, he was an old troublemaker. He would go into the construction site to organize a union, get fired and move on to the next site.”

Mystery Prize U-Turn

Not everyone agrees with Loach and Allen’s take on what happened in the Republican camp. The director recounts how he and producer O’Brien left Cannes in 1995 with the sense that the drama had made a mark.

“There was a lot of discussion about it and people seemed to like it, we only stayed for a few days, but reading what was written in the papers and listening to what friends said, it looked like we might get an award. We were happy about that but we didn’t count our chickens at all,” said Loach.

When they got the call to return to Cannes the night before the awards ceremony, expectations were even higher as Loach boarded a flight to Nice with wife Leslie and O’Brien.

“When we got the message to go back, I thought, ‘Oh my God, there it is’. I dug out the dinner jacket and threw it in the suitcase, and Leslie, my wife, put on the frock and we met Rebecca at the airport. O’Brien, please leave the plane’,” Loach recalled.

“It was a humiliating situation where everyone on the plane watched us being escorted as if we were criminals or about to be arrested or something. Anyway, after landing we got a message, ‘no, no, nothing about you’, we went back to our place and had a cup of tea.”

Loach revealed that they learned years later that a Stalinist-sympathetic jury member had reversed the film’s award.

“I don’t know what he said… that it wasn’t true, that it was dangerous… whatever he said must have been something tangible to persuade them to withdraw the award,” he recounted.

The Definitive Film

While the film was not awarded at Cannes, it still marked a milestone for Loach and O’Brien on many fronts. It was Loach’s first lead film produced by O’Brien, and their first European coproduction. The latter was a gamechanger for Loach who was struggling to find support for his work in the UK.

“It was an important and critical time. The 80s were a bad decade, in everything, politically and filmmaking. I was able to start filming again in 1989 A hidden agenda. Then we made three films for Channel 4, The Riff-Raff, Rain Stonesagain A hen, a hen but these are made on a limited budget for a domestic audience,” said Loach.

O’Brien recounts how producer Sally Hibben, who produced Loach’s films under the Parallax Films banner for many years, was instrumental in finding fellow European producers.

“We knew we had to do it by doing coproduction but we had never done it before,” he said. “Sally was going to present in Spain A hen, a hen at the Valladolid Film Festival and committed to finding Spanish partners.”

There, he met Spanish director and producer Gerardo Herrero at Tournesol Films, who in turn put him in touch with German producer Ulrich Felsberg, Wim Wenders’ partner in Road Movies.

“It was a lucky group that ended up working for us for 15 years,” said O’Brien. “I had never done a coproduction before, so it was very difficult.

The film will continue to be filmed in and around the town of Mirambel on the border of Aragon and Castellon, which was in the process of restoration at the time, and in Barcelona.

O’Brien recalls how they called Laverty in LA, where he was studying writing and working on the screenplay that would become Loach’s 1996 drama Nicaragua. Carla’s song, to get ideas for political discussions in the film and ended up playing one of the soldiers.

“It was an exciting time. It was a difficult film to make, but everyone was passionate about making it. It was a very beautiful film. It was a difficult climate and in the middle of nowhere, but the group of actors and crew we put together were so committed that they grew legs … it was an amazing and beautiful thing,” he said.

Loach and O’Brien formalized their filmmaking partnership with the founding of the production house Sixteen Films in 2003, and it has produced all of Loach’s films since including the 2006 Palme d’Or winner. The Wind That Shakes the Barley and all his subsequent Cannes competitors including I, Daniel Blake and the final film Old Oak.

In 2009, the company linked up with Pascal Cauchuteux and Thomas Sorlat at Why Not Productions and Vincent Maraval at Wild Bunch, now Goodfellas, after the latter went on sale. Looking for Ericstarring Eric Cantona. These French partners have worked on all of Loach’s films since then.

Loach says that in retrospect the continental European partners made perfect sense, and gave him a lot of freedom throughout his career.

“British filmmaking tends to look across the Atlantic, and I’ve been looking across the English Channel to Europe,” he says.

“It’s incredibly lucky, amazing, that he was able to keep the same people supporting us with a little change at the time, and we were able to make a film every 18 months or two years without controlling the cast.”

Preserving the Legacy

Loach, who turns 90 in June, also confirmed to Deadline that Old Oak it was indeed his last film, saying that he was no longer physically strong enough due to the rigors of the set.

O’Brien continues to produce under the Sixteen Films banner but is also on a mission to collect all of Loach’s films in one collection, which is no bad thing since they were made under many different production, sales and distribution lines.

The first major step in this ambition was the recent move to appoint Goodfellas as the global sales agent for seven key titles, while at the same time entrusting their future distribution to Le Pacte in France, and Curzon in the UK and Ireland.

They include the Cannes selections The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Earth and Freedom, My name is Joe, Bread & Rosesagain Sweet Sixteen and selected work from Venice Navigators again Ae Fond Kiss premiered in Berlin.

“We’ve wanted for a long time to put the catalog under one roof where possible,” says O’Brien. “We’ve been working with Goodfellows and their predecessors Wild Bunch, for 15, 20 years. We had other offers and were looking at other possibilities, but it made the most sense to go to Goodfellows because we know them closely and love them.

“These films don’t just come out of one place. They are part of 20 to 30 films that talk about our lives in the 50, 60, past years. It is very important for us to make them accessible… in fact we have been trying to find the right partners, and we are very happy that these films have all arrived because we do not need experts in the market. But we know that there is a growing number of these types of projects in the market to have teams that know and care deeply about us.

The Future of Sixteen Films

At the same time O’Brien continues to produce under the Sixteen Films banner, with his son Jack Thomas-O’Brien serving as producer. Recent productions include the horror of Athina Rachel Tsangari Harvesting and Laura Carreira In the fall about a young Portuguese woman who works in a warehouse in Glasgow.

O’Brien says that while the spirit of Loach’s work is at the heart of the company’s identity, future projects at its core are in its infancy.

“They’re not sub-Ken Loach films. They’re more like meaningful projects,” he says. “Sixteen Films wants to be a place for new films and a home for old films and their legacy.”

Loach, for his part, hopes that Sixteen Films will continue the fight to tell stories that highlight the social divides that he believes are still at the heart of societies around the world.

“We need an audience that is aware of the categories, to use the old language, because that is one of the big myths that our society cultivates, that we are all in this together, that we all have the same interests. But clearly, we do not have it. There is a division in the heart of the community between those who sell their work and those who profit from it, so we are not together,” he said.

“Encouraging others to share that vision, obviously is something I like to do, and to be a witness in our time. It is important that we look at how it is, or how it was, and with all our knowledge, with all our understanding, and with all our power to bring it to life and make it a human experience. I think that is the task of filmmakers. We have had a journey, but I have failed many times, and you have failed to do that many times. Pass.”