The real hearts of oak

The power of the lens, food and hospitality drive the hope in Ken Loach’s last film. Krish Kandiah reviews The Old Oak.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A man and a woman sit in a cathedral pew and incline their heads towards each other.

Ebla Mari and Dave Turner play Yara and TJ.

BBC Film.

In the dusty back room of the rather rundown Old Oak pub in County Durham, northeast England there is a faded black and white photo. It shows the very same room packed full of hungry families sharing a community meal together. Below it is written a sign:

“When you eat together you stick together.”

Pub Landlord Tommy Joe Ballantyne explains to young Syrian refugee photographer Yara that the picture was taken by his uncle during the miner’s strike when the community made it a priority to feed each other’s children no matter what.

This is the pivotal scene in Ken Loach’s latest, and some suggest, final film: The Old Oak. The multi-award-winning director has produced another masterful piece of cinema which, although set in 2016, provides vivid social commentary on our current cost-of-living crisis and our struggling immigration and asylum system.

By setting the film in an old colliery town facing its own challenges with social deprivation, Loach allows those communities who feel left behind by the rest of the country to raise legitimate concerns about immigration. The film powerfully portrays local people expressing frustration at being used as a dumping ground by government for ex-prisoners while also feeling trapped by unemployment, falling house prices and rising costs. Into this community then arrive refugees fleeing the brutal war in Syria.

The film is not just depicting some sort of Hollywood romantic utopia. It is powerfully celebrating what is happening in communities all around the UK.

Yara arrives camera in hand, snapping photographs of her family’s arrival on a bus. They are met with hostility from the beginning. We see the conflict through the lens of Yara’s camera - black and white photographs that foreshadow the photos of the miner’s struggle she will later discover on the wall of the pub’s back room. We see another photo – the one Yara’s mother displays pride of place in the lounge – of Yara’s father who is lost in the brutal Syrian prison system. These photographs provide beautiful symbolism throughout the movie signalling the themes of solidarity and resistance.

We see in the film the power of the camera to change the way that people see their world and view others in the face of hatred. We see the power of food to unite divided communities. We see the power of hospitality in the face of hostility. We see families from both communities caught in impossible situations.

What this film does most brilliantly, in the rich dialogue which sounds less like a script and more like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, is allow the strongest arguments against refuge and asylum to be raised. Ultimately this dialogue opens the eyes of the two communities, and enables them to discover that they have so much more in common than they might have imagined.

I have witnessed these eye-opening moments connection myself. I have seen Afghans resettled to hotels find a welcome into a village community through integrated cricket matches. I have seen women with no common language forge friendships over a picnic. I have seen children change from sullen and suspicious to animated and inseparable in minutes with the help of an X-box. I have seen the beer and pub industry offer support and help to Ukrainians. I have seen churches open their doors and their hearts to Muslims from Kosovo and Syria. The film is not just depicting some sort of Hollywood romantic utopia. It is powerfully celebrating what is happening in communities all around the UK.

The mining community, that once lost jobs, financial stability and heritage, eats alongside the refugee community – those who have now lost their homes

That dusty pub back room is transformed to the bustling hub of community life once again, as families from different worlds befriend and support each other over shared meals and recognition of their common mortality and humanity. The understanding that both communities have experienced displacement has brought them together. The mining community, that once lost jobs, financial stability and heritage, eats alongside the refugee community – those who have now lost their homes, their country and their heritage.

In a beautiful moment of reconciliation in the film, the Syrian families present their new neighbours with a banner made in the style of the traditional mining banners used on gala days – the ones that took pride of place on marches just behind a brass band. The banner is inscribed in both English and Arabic with the words that have drawn the communities together: Strength, Solidarity, Resistance.

I believe the film, like the banner, offers a rallying cry to those who see it. It helps us understand two of the most marginalised communities in Britain at the moment – the impoverished towns of the North, and the refugees and asylum seekers. It challenges us to find ways to come together with empathy and hospitality. It proffers significant mutually beneficial consequences – love, joy, peace, hope, friendship, forgiveness, reconciliation - when we learn not only to live together, but to share food, time and lives together.

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7 May 2025

4 min read

Why does the Pope matter today?

The personal, vivid link to the origins of the movement that changed the world.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An Anglican bishop wearing purple shakes hands with the Pope.

The author meeting the late Pope, 2024.

There is something about the way popes are elected that captures the imagination. Whoever dreamt up the idea of black smoke for ‘no decision’, and white smoke for ‘habemus papam’ – ‘we have a new pope’ - was a genius at marketing. So much better than a press release or a tweet from the Vatican X account.

The conclave was brought to our imagination so vividly by the recent film with Ralph Fiennes. We love the idea of secret debates, intrigue, people locked away from the world until they come to a decision with arcane ancient rituals and an uncertain outcome. Was there ever a film whose release was better timed?

There are also the sheer numbers involved. There are approximately 1.4 billion Catholics in the world today – roughly the same as the population of India and China, the world most populous nations. Yet the identity of the new pope is of matters to the rest of us too. The leader of China of India is of interest especially to people living in China or India, but maybe less so for those of us who don’t. The new pope is the head of churches round the corner from where you live, or of people with whom you work, or, if you are Catholic yourself, your own spiritual leader. This appointment matters.

Yet it’s not just the optics, the drama, the numbers. And it’s not just for Catholics either. I am an Anglican, and since the Reformation of the sixteenth century, we have had in our own 39 Articles the statement: “The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.” That might seem to settle the matter that it’s of no interest to English Protestants. But that would be wrong.

I met Pope Francis once. It was at a gathering of Anglican Archbishops in Rome last year. We all were led through magnificent Vatican corridors into an imposing state room, adorned with fantastic frescoes, where the white-robed Holy Father was brought in on his wheelchair to deliver a brief 20-minute homily to us all.

It was a good talk, thoughtful, well-constructed, but in many ways unremarkable. It didn’t say anything much that I hadn’t heard from other sources. Yet somehow this was different. His words carried a weight, a gravity that went beyond the content of the lecture itself. It was as if, when he entered that room, he carried with him two thousand years of church history.

The line of Bishops of Rome goes back to St Peter, the gruff, unschooled fisherman who Jesus called from his mundane life to become an apostle, and who then on, was so captured by the person of Jesus that he gave his life in the cause. I left that room conscious of the weight of the office of the papacy, even if I don’t recognise him as my direct spiritual father.

Listening to this successor of St Peter felt like you were listening to one of the friends of Jesus – and this was not just the personal quality of the man himself, but something about the office he occupied. It was a personal, vivid link to the origins of the Christian movement, the first stirrings of the revolution.

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past.

Of course, there have been some pretty terrible occupants of the papal see, whose personal lives showed scant evidence of any knowledge of, or relationship with Jesus. The sixteenth century Roderigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) comes to mind, who despite the rule on clerical celibacy, had several children from various mistresses, won the Papacy by bribing cardinals, and made his favourite son bishop of several lucrative sees at the age of eighteen, and a cardinal at nineteen. So, there is nothing automatic about this – which is why the Protestant Reformers denied the idea of any blanket automatic papal authority.

Yet when a person of evident holiness is combined with this notion of the weight of the office, the papacy becomes a gift to all of us, linking us back to the earliest followers of Jesus – even to Jesus himself.

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past. Monarchies do something similar – linking us to the past through the long line of kings and queens of England, Denmark, Spain or wherever, yet more often than not, the events they lead us back to, the process by which those families took power, reveal murky politics, bribery and bloody battles.

This is a line in history that links us to the event that, if Tom Holland’s Dominion is to be believed, has had more impact in shaping western culture than any other – the remarkable life, death and resurrection of Jesus – a radical life full of love, self-giving and transformative power – for both individuals and whole civilisations. And for that, whether we are Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or even, perhaps, unbeliever, we might raise a prayer - or a glass - of thanksgiving.