When one considers the mood, tone and formal choices of certain national cinemas across the spectrum of world film-making, it is generally possible to discern several or more, sometimes competing, trends at play within any given territory. When it comes to British film, however, one genre and approach stands above all and any other: that of the social realist drama. This has grown out of the country's long-standing achievements in theatre and its pioneering documentary tradition, as well as its century-long commitment - only recently unravelling - to publicly-funded broadcast of politically-aware drama on radio and television.

In this extensive body of work - featuring of course hundreds, if not thousands of writers, directors and producers - the most prominent maker domestically and internationally is, by a considerable margin, Ken Loach. One of only nine directors in the history of the Cannes Film Festival to have won two Palme d'Or awards and the person with the most films - 15 - in competition there, Loach is one of the most acclaimed film-makers in the history of the medium. Renowned and respected globally for his profound and life-long  commitment to working-class concerns, expressed in a warm and deeply empathetic - while also justifiably angry - manner that never patronises either his characters or his audience, Loach has crafted, over six decades, an unmatched cinema of solidarity that draws on specific stories, protagonists, locations and conditions to speak universally to its perennial themes of oppression, injustice and resistance, both personal and collective.

Apart from reflecting his own personal political position as a progressive Socialist, there's a deeply structural reason why Loach values and advocates for such a way of being in the world, and its attendant filmic representation and embodiment. Born in 1936, he was one of the many beneficiaries of the radical policy changes in social organisation and education brought in by the post-war 1945 British Labour government. From a working class background in the English midlands, he went to a long-established grammar school and then to the university of Oxford. Following a period as an actor in the country's regional theatre, he joined the BBC as a director for television, where he developed his distinctive approach to the dramatisation of the key social and political issues of the day. Always developing ideas closely with equally engaged and passionate writers, he has since directed dozens of television 'plays', as well as feature dramas and non-fiction works for the format, only concluding in that arena just before the turn of the millennium.

We are showing three of these works in this season: Up the Junction (1965, from stories of women's lives in London by Nell Dunn), The Big Flame (1969, tracking an occupation by Liverpool dock workers) and one of the most famous pieces in the history of television, 1966's Cathy Come Home, concerning the devastating effects of homelessness on family cohesion. A staggering work that still shocks, it eventually led to changes in British law.

Famous for working regularly with performers who are not professional actors, Loach films chronologically, revealing the script in stages and only letting each of his actors know what they need to at any given moment. From his first feature for the cinema, Poor Cow (1967, adapting a Nell Dunn novel focused on a young woman's social and emotional pressures) through more than 30 titles and 55 years, he has developed and refined these strategies to striking and often revelatory effect, creating an extraordinary authenticity and incremental emotional intensity.

This accumulating power is experienced harrowingly in his 1969 Kes, an adaptation of Barry Hines' semi-autobiographical novel about a brutal education system, the hope of a wider horizon and a search for beauty in the more-than-human. One of the greatest films about childhood, it was Loach's second feature film.

The 1970s and early 1980s were extremely productive for Loach, especially in television, and he worked on three more projects with Hines. Meanwhile, the period also saw the development of neo-liberal capitalism, termed Thatcherism in the UK after prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who looked to reshape British politics, society and economics as extensively in right-wing terms as the left-wing Attlee government had done 40 years earlier. These policies set in motion many of the social problems — the housing crisis, huge economic and social inequality, environmental degradation, a growing exclusionary nationalism etc. — the exploration and countering of which would dominate Loach's cinema from then until the present. From these many works, we are screening Raining Stones (1993), Ladybird, Ladybird (1994, a sister to Cathy Come Home), 2016 Palme d'Or winner I, Daniel Blake and the 2019 precarity drama Sorry We Missed You. Even 2009's sports comedy drama Looking For Eric is informed by an acute and socially-informed personal crisis.

Before these, however, he would make Fatherland (1986, from an original script by the late Trevor Griffiths), a political drama set both in England and Germany, and the first film he would make abroad. While tonally quite distinct, it does constitute one of the half dozen films Loach has made internationally. These include Carla's Song (1987), a love story linking Scotland and revolutionary Nicaragua, and Bread and Roses (2000, which maintains the Hispanic focus but moves it to Los Angeles and the struggle for janitorial union recognition). Also among them are his two great historical civil war epics, the Spanish-set Land and Freedom (1995) and his 2006 Palme d'Or-winning Irish The Wind that Shakes the Barley, starring the 2024 Academy Award-garlanded Cillian Murphy.

What is also notable here is that it is out of these works that two of the most important and enduring creative relationships in Loach's life emerged. Carla's Song was written by then human rights activist Paul Laverty, who has scripted all but one of the director's fiction features since, while Rebecca O'Brien has produced all of his films since Land and Freedom (she co-produced his Northern-Irish secret state political thriller Hidden Agenda in 1990). They set up production company Sixteen Films in 2002 to enable this extensive portfolio. Such a shared vision, and the trusts that come with decades of work together, states unequivocally the centrality of collaboration to Loach's working methods, his sense of cinema's radical potential, and his political convictions. This collective approach extends to all the actors, the crew, the wider community of the film's concerns and of course to the audience for his numerous films.

In this united front, complex and traumatic histories are remembered and respected; the public realm is celebrated and defended and there is a moving witness to injustice. Lives normally overlooked at best and deliberately marginalised at worst are given back their dignity. Voices are heard, anger is allowed, experiences are acknowledged. In what is currently his final feature, 2023's The Old Oak, the local, national and international come together in a meeting between the titular-named pub (metaphor and incarnation of an enduring English solidarity) and a family tree of participants who seek to define their own terms of belonging in the face of governmental hostility. This self-made social contract from the ground up underscores what Ken Loach has sought to remind us of for more than half a century and in over 60 films - work that has confirmed the humanity inherent within cinema itself and in his own country of the heart and mind, one without borders or walls - that another better world is possible.