The last round

Veteran director Ken Loach says goodbye to a lifetime of political cinema with a story of hope in an English mining town.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

The Old Oak is the name of a pub which also serves as the title of Ken Loach's latest film. And as the director's final feature, it's a good reference to him as well - unwavering, deeply rooted and long a part of the English landscape.

After I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You, the movie completes a trilogy all set in contemporary northeast England.

Like those films, The Old Oak could not be made by anyone else but British cinema's greatest proponent of social realism. It paints a bleak picture of abandoned people in an abandoned region - one where life in a former mining village is centred on the titular last pub standing. The village reaches a flashpoint when the authorities send Syrian refugees to live in the town's worthless crumbling houses, one traumatised group living alongside locals who mostly resent their arrival into their impoverished streets.

But unlike its two predecessors, The Old Oak has a happy, hopeful ending. In fact - spoiler alert - it ends with a parade. Loach filmed the finale against the annual Durham Miners' Gala, which last year attracted 200,000 people to the cathedral city. It might seem fitting that the final reel of Loach's career involves some union banner waving. Given his near-30 feature films and decades of television drama before that, he possibly deserves a brass band in his send-off.