Ken Loach Talks Challenges & Resonance Of ‘Land And Freedom’ As Spanish Civil War Drama Returns To Cannes & Mystery Of 1995 Prize U-Turn

EXCLUSIVE: Bafta and Palme d’Or-winning director Ken Loach and producer Rebecca O’Brien are in Cannes for this evening’s Cinéma de Plage screening of a remastered 4K version of Spanish Civil War drama Land and Freedom which originally premiered at the festival in competition in 1995.

The screening falls just two months shy of the 90th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War on July 17, 1936, in which some 500,000 would die, and as many more would flee the country.

Talking to Deadline ahead of the screening, Loach says the conflict still resonates with the Left to this day as the first international fight against fascism.

He adds it also holds abiding lessons around the perils of infighting and the determination of conservative powers to quash socialist ideals, as evidenced by the non-interference stance of the U.S. and the UK, which he says was a form of tacit support for Franco.

In Land and Freedom, Ian Hart stars as David Carr, an unemployed man from Liverpool who travels to Spain in 1936 to help in the fight against Franco’s Nationalists. Rather than joining the Stalinist International Brigade, he ends up enlisting with Trotskyist splinter group, the POUM.

He was joined in the cast by Rosana Pastor, Icíar Bollaín and Tom Gilroy among many others, and Cannes 2026 jury member Paul Laverty in a small role.

The film created a stir when it debuted in Cannes for its exploration of the divisions along Communist-Leftist lines on the Republican side, with commentators suggesting at the time that Loach was re-opening a deep, unspoken wound.

“The attacks by the Communist Party on the Revolutionary Left was a story that hadn’t been told. The story of the left’s resistance to the fascists was cornered by the Communist Party but the revolutionaries, the anarchists and the POUM, which is what George Orwell belonged to, that story was never told and it was devastating,” Loach tells Deadline.

“To tell that story was extraordinary and a brilliant, wonderful experience because the young Spanish didn’t know the story at all, didn’t know their own history,” he adds.

Jim Allen, who previously worked with Loach on Hidden Agenda and The Gathering Seed, wrote the screenplay.

“He was a wonderful writer,  a brilliant man, working-class man who learned his politics on the frontline,” says Loach. “He was a miner, a docker, a building worker, and an old-fashioned agitator. He would go on a building site to recruit for the union, get sacked and then move onto the next site.”

Mystery of the Prize U-Turn

Not everyone agreed with Loach and Allen’s take on what happened in the Republican camp. The director recounts how he and producer O’Brien had left Cannes in 1995 with a sense that the drama had made a mark.

“There was a lot of discussion about it and people seemed to like it. We were only there for a few days, but reading what was being written in the papers and listening to what friends were saying, it looked as though we might be up for an award. We were thrilled about that but not counting our chickens at all,” says Loach.

When they got a call summoning them back to Cannes on the eve of the awards ceremony, expectations were even higher as Loach boarded the plane to Nice alongside wife Leslie and O’Brien.

“When we got the message to go back, I thought, ‘My God, this is it’. I dug out the dinner jacket and threw it in the suitcase, and Leslie, my wife, put in a frock and we met with Rebecca at the airport. We got on the plane, it was all very exciting but then quite literally as the door was closing an announcement came over the loudspeaker, ‘Will Mr. Loach, Mrs Loach and Miss O’Brien please leave the plane’,” recalls Loach.

“It was a humiliating situation with everyone in the plane watching us be escorted off, as if we were criminals or going to be arrested or something. Anyway, after we came off, we got the message, ‘no, no, there’s nothing for you’. We went back to our place and had a cup of tea.”

Loach reveals that they learned some years later that a jury member with Stalinist sympathies had reversed a decision to give the film a prize.

“I don’t know what he said… that it wasn’t the truth, that it was dangerous… whatever he said it must have been something fairly substantial to persuade them to withdraw the prize,” he recounts.

Decisive Film

While the film went unawarded in Cannes, it still marked a milestone for Loach and O’Brien on a number of fronts. It was the first film by Loach lead produced by O’Brien, and their first European coproduction. The latter was a gamechanger for Loach who had struggled to find support for his work in the UK.

“It was decisive and a critical moment. The 80s were a bad decade, in every respect, both politically and for filmmaking. I managed to start filming again in 1989 with Hidden agenda. Then we did three films with Channel 4, Riff-Raff, Raining Stones, and Ladybird, Ladybird but these were made with modest budgets for domestic audiences,” says Loach. “The European co-production became a model for everything that we’ve made over the past 30 years.”

O’Brien recounts how producer Sally Hibben, who produced Loach’s film under the Parallax Films banner for many years, was instrumental in finding European co-producers.

“We knew we had to do it through a coproduction but we hadn’t done one before,” she says. “Sally was going to Spain to launch Ladybird, Ladybird at the Valladolid Film Festival and took it upon herself to find Spanish partners.”

There, she met Spanish director and producer Gerardo Herrero at Tournesol Films, who in turn connected her with German producer Ulrich Felsberg, Wim Wenders’s partner at Road Movies.

“It turned out to be a very fortuitous grouping which ended up working for us over a period of 15 years,” says O’Brien. “I hadn’t done a coproduction before, so it was complicated. I was learning on the job in a world where there was no internet, just fax machines grinding away.”

The film would go on to shoot in and around the village of Mirambel on the border of Aragon and Castellón, which was in the process of being restored at the time, and also in Barcelona.

O’Brien recalls how they summoned Laverty back from L.A., where he was on a writing scholarship and working on a screenplay that would become become Loach’s 1996 Nicaragua-set drama Carla’s Song, for input around the political dialogue in the film and he ended up playing one of the militiamen.

“It was a very passionate moment. It was a difficult film to make it, but everybody was passionate about making it. It was a very visceral film. It was tough a climate and in the middle of nowhere, but the group of actors and the crew we put together were so committed that it grew legs… it was a wonderful and very good experience,” she says.

Loach and O’Brien officialized their filmmaking partnership with the creation of production house Sixteen Films in 2003, and it has produced all of Loach’s films since including 2006 Palme d’Or winner The Wind That Shakes The Barley and all his subsequent Cannes contenders including I, Daniel Blake and last film The Old Oak. 

In 2009, the company connected with Pascal Caucheteux and Thomas Sorlat at Why Not Productions as well as Vincent Maraval at Wild Bunch, now Goodfellas, after the latter took on sales for Looking for Eric, starring Eric Cantona. These French partners have worked on all of Loach’s films since.

Loach says in retrospect the continental European partners made perfect sense, and have also given him greater freedom across his career.

“British filmmaking tends to look across the Atlantic, and I’ve always looked across the English Channel to Europe. The films we’ve done are writer-director driven and made as a collective and are very un-American in their style and interest,” he says.

“It’s extraordinary luck, extraordinary, to have been able to keep the same people backing us with very little change for that amount of time, and be able to make a film every 18 months or two years with no control over casting.”

Conserving the Legacy

Loach, who turns to 90 in June, reconfirmed to Deadline that The Old Oak was truly his last feature film, saying he is no longer physically strong enough for the rigors of being on set.

O’Brien continues to produce under the Sixteen Films banner but is also on a mission to gather all of Loach’s films in one collection, which is no mean feat because they were made under so many different production, sales and distribution configurations.

A first major step in this ambition was the recent move to appoint Goodfellas as worldwide sales agent for seven key titles, at the same time as entrusting their future distribution to Le Pacte in France, and Curzon in the UK and Ireland.

They comprise Cannes selections The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Land and Freedom, My Name is Joe, Bread & Roses, and Sweet Sixteen as well as Venice-selected work The Navigators and Ae Fond Kiss which premiered in Berlin.

“We wanted for a very long time to put the back catalog under one roof where possible,” says O’Brien.  “We have been working with Goodfellow and their predecessors Wild Bunch, for 15, 20, years now. We had other offers and were looking at other possibilities, but it made most sense best to go to Goodfellows because we know them intimately and we love them.

“These films are not just one off. They belong to a collection of 20 to 30 films that talk about our live over the last 50, 60, years. It is so important for us to make them accessible… we’ve actually been on a quest for some time to find the right partners, and we’re absolutely delighted that these chaps have all come on board because we need them. We’re not experts in distribution or knowing how the market works for archive films, but we know there’s an increasing value in the market for these sorts of projects. Having teams on board with the know-how who also care as deeply as us matters.”

Future of Sixteen Films

At the same time O’Brien continues to produce under the Sixteen Films banner, with her son Jack Thomas-O’Brien working alongside her as a producer. Recent productions include Athina Rachel Tsangari’s folk horror Harvest and Laura Carreira’s On Falling about a young Portuguese woman working in a warehouse in Glasgow.

O’Brien says that while the spirit of Loach’s work is at the heart of the company’s identity, the upcoming projects on its slate are very much in their own mould.

“They’re not sub-Ken Loach films. They are like minded projects,” she says. “Sixteen Films wants to be a place for new films as well a home for old films and their legacy.”

Loach, for his part, hopes Sixteen Films will carry on the fight of telling stories highlighting the social divisions he believes still lie at the heart of societies worldwide.

“We need audiences that are class conscious, to use the old language, because that’s one of the great myths that our society cultivates, is that we’re all in this together, that we all have the same interests. But clearly, we don’t. There is a schism at the heart of society between those who sell their labor and those who profit from it, so we’re not in it together,” he says,

“To encourage others to share that point of view, is obviously something that I like to do, and to be a witness to our time as well. It’s important to look at how it is, or how it was, and to the best of our knowledge, the best of our understanding, and the best of our ability make it live and make it human experience. I think that’s the task for filmmakers. We had a go, actually failed many times, but you have to have a go, and that’s what I’d like to pass on.”