Jornal da Mostra
Subscribe here the 'Jornal da Mostra'
Edição:
Leon Cakoff, de Cannes, para o ‘Jornal da Mostra’
Ken Loach makes an epic film on the irish divide
A film in competition at the 59th Cannes Film Festival - "The Wind that Shakes the Barley", by master film maker Ken Loach, is a reconstitution of Ireland in 1920 with the acknowledged vigor of his cinema of Brechtian features - in a formula for fermenting conscience that, in Loach`s film, is transferred, as the title suggests, to barley and a peasant family. The Irish conscience arises as a reaction to unbearable pressure from the English `Black and Tan` troops occupying the country.
The film is in the nature of ancient revolutionary pamphlets, and acts as such
- a model of cinema very much in evidence in the sixties and extremely rare
in the trivialized language of film making today. As always, Ken Loach has his
actors shine - here with Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney, as brother
and sister who take their different ways with the growth of the movement for
the independence of Ireland, guerrilla warfare, and repression from the British
Empire.
Ken Loach, in his wisdom, builds an afresco that comes to completion with the
patient observation of the viewer. Although his film deals with the origins
of a movement pro liberty, the weight of the British Empire does not yet release
Ireland from a historical yoke that, as Loach points out, dates as far back
as the twelfth century. His pamphlet formula comes to a halt at this point.
Reality does not adorn itself with fantasy spelled out in old socialist primers.
Loach drives on down to the origins of a division that still serves today to
subdue a culture. And at the source of this divide is the villain of yore, more
deep-rooted than colonial violence, more violent than the bloody cycles of repression
and resistance: human misery and hunger.
For further information:
www.festival-cannes.org
