CANNES: British director Ken Loach believes that reclaiming the past holds the key to understanding the present, drawing parallels between Ireland in the 1920s and today’s occupation of Iraq.
On Sunday the veteran director won the Cannes Palme d’Or here for his film ‘The Wind That Shakes The Barley’, a gut-wrenching story of the early days of Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain.
“The story of what happened in Ireland is of a colony gaining partial independence and that’s very similar to how colonies gain independence in Africa and anywhere else,” Loach told AFP earlier in the 12-day festival.
“And not only that, it’s the story of an army of occupation against the wishes of the people, and obviously there are many contemporary references to that.”
His film tells the story of two brothers, who join a rag-tag band of guerrillas in a bid to force the British, supported by the notorious auxiliaries known as the Black and Tans, out of Ireland.
The film is brutal in its portrayal of the violence meted out by the latter, but also unflinching in showing what happens when an unpopular peace treaty which pledges Irish allegiance to the British crown tears the brothers apart.
Loach, who was nominated seven times before at Cannes and is known for his radical, political films such as the 1995 “Land and Freedom” about the Spanish civil war, was unapologetic for the shocking scenes of brutality and torture.
“We should be shocked by that, because all too often it’s presented that we don’t torture people, it’s always the foreigners who torture people and it’s not true,” he said, pointing to recent abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay.
“The brutality of the British in Ireland is legendary, it’s a matter of historical record, and the names of Black and Tans became notorious,” he said, adding the very nature of an occupying force is one of violence and oppression.
“The army behaves in a certain way, the soldiers behave in a certain way. They develop ideas about the people they’re oppressing, they become racist. They learn to despise them. They are allowed to kill them without any action being taken. And the whole thing escalates.
“How many have we killed now? How many have we killed in Iraq? An independent body gave the figure as over 100,000 in a couple of years.
“And the British were found guilty by an international court of degrading and inhumane treatment of prisoners in the north of Ireland 20, 30 years ago. So it isn’t just in the past.”
He quoted Czech writer Milan Kundera saying: “The struggle of people against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
“The struggle to reclaim the past is absolutely essential to understanding the present, otherwise we are the victims of propaganda all the time,” Loach said.
He was also scathing of current moves by Britain and France to put their colonial histories behind them.—AFP
