The radical movie-maker Ken Loach has a new film - The Angels’ Share. It is a bittersweet a comedy. Robbie (Paul Brannigan), a young Glaswegian labelled as much by his criminal record as the chib mark on his face, wants to change his life. He wants away from the violence and the feuding, he wants a job and a future. But it’s not easy to escape your past and there aren’t many people who will help you to do it. The Angels’ Share is about people being given a chance. Loach practices what he preaches. Paul Brannigan is an ex-prisoner.
If you ask Loach why he wanted to tell this story, he’ll tell you it’s because last year the number of unemployed young people in Britain reached more than a million. He’ll tell you that he wanted to give a voice to the young people in this country who face what he calls an “empty future”. It’s a theme he’s explored before.
“We did a film called Kes,” - regarded as amongst the best British films ever made – “which is about a lad with a talent that nobody can recognise, or that nobody chose to recognise. The system wouldn’t allow for it to be recognised because there was a demand for semi-skilled or unskilled labour, that’s what the school system produced; that was the point of the 11 plus.”
“Now again it’s the economic system which cannot provide a decent life for a large number of people,” he says. “It won’t provide security, it won’t provide a decent job. We’re denying that to a huge number of kids. And even the ones who are allegedly in work are in temporary work or on short-term contracts or hired by the day. People become humiliated. They don’t have any defining, dignified sense of who they are through work. What strikes me – we’re apparently at the mercy of an economic system that will never work and the big question is, how do we change it, not how do we put up with it.”
Paul Brannigan, knows first-hand about the struggles his charater Robbie faces. He explains “If you ask any young boy what they think of the Scotland national team, they’ll tell you they’re shite. Scotland are shite at all sports. That starts from a very young age and that’s not only about sport, it’s about life in general: ‘Ach you’ll never get a job here, it’s shite.’ It goes back to young boys having problems at home which means the only family they feel they’ve got are their friends, gangs they’re in. When friends are shoplifting, stealing, fighting, stabbing, slashing, shooting – whatever it might be, selling drugs – they feel they need to do it because that’s all they’ve got and they’re scared to say no. It’s feeling that you belong to something but not realising that belonging to that isn’t going to get you anywhere other than into prison, into trouble or dead.”
Definitely sounds like a film worth watching when it eventually comes to the screens.
http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/film/interview-ken-loach-director-of-the-angels-share-1-2292242
If you ask Loach why he wanted to tell this story, he’ll tell you it’s because last year the number of unemployed young people in Britain reached more than a million. He’ll tell you that he wanted to give a voice to the young people in this country who face what he calls an “empty future”. It’s a theme he’s explored before.
“We did a film called Kes,” - regarded as amongst the best British films ever made – “which is about a lad with a talent that nobody can recognise, or that nobody chose to recognise. The system wouldn’t allow for it to be recognised because there was a demand for semi-skilled or unskilled labour, that’s what the school system produced; that was the point of the 11 plus.”
“Now again it’s the economic system which cannot provide a decent life for a large number of people,” he says. “It won’t provide security, it won’t provide a decent job. We’re denying that to a huge number of kids. And even the ones who are allegedly in work are in temporary work or on short-term contracts or hired by the day. People become humiliated. They don’t have any defining, dignified sense of who they are through work. What strikes me – we’re apparently at the mercy of an economic system that will never work and the big question is, how do we change it, not how do we put up with it.”
Paul Brannigan, knows first-hand about the struggles his charater Robbie faces. He explains “If you ask any young boy what they think of the Scotland national team, they’ll tell you they’re shite. Scotland are shite at all sports. That starts from a very young age and that’s not only about sport, it’s about life in general: ‘Ach you’ll never get a job here, it’s shite.’ It goes back to young boys having problems at home which means the only family they feel they’ve got are their friends, gangs they’re in. When friends are shoplifting, stealing, fighting, stabbing, slashing, shooting – whatever it might be, selling drugs – they feel they need to do it because that’s all they’ve got and they’re scared to say no. It’s feeling that you belong to something but not realising that belonging to that isn’t going to get you anywhere other than into prison, into trouble or dead.”
Definitely sounds like a film worth watching when it eventually comes to the screens.
http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/film/interview-ken-loach-director-of-the-angels-share-1-2292242
