From the opening scenes where a bunch of young men are abused by British forces for engaging in unlawful assembly - playing a hurling match - the divisions on the Republican side become clear. Following the killing of one of the hurlers for refusing to give his name in English, choices have to be made. Idealists, romantics, socialists, nationalists, pragmatists, careerists, opportunists, mé féiners - all must decide, will they fight back, and if they do, how? And so is born a revolution, not from the rhetoric of would be leaders, but out of the real life experiences of Wolfe Tone's 'men of no property'.

Seán Ó Faoláin, in his auto-biography, Vive Moi, explained why some were involved in the fight for Irish freedom; men like the Sinn Fein General Secretary of the time, Paudeen O'Keeffe, who in response to an English journalist's question as why he was active in the movement, banged his fist on his desk and roared, "Vingence, bejasus". And from such was the popular myth of the hate-filled and vengeful Irish brought to the British public.

In the film, Loach is more sympathetic to this simplistic nationalist side than such outbursts may merit, but he proves respectful of the socialist ideals brought to the revolution by the followers of James Connolly. It is indeed a rare treat to hear the social programme of the first Dáil quoted on the big screen. This occurs in a conversation between two of the main characters spending their last night in a prison cell as they await execution. It certainly makes a welcome change from the death bed sentimentality of Padraig Pearse's poetry, which was force fed to every school child in Ireland since the foundation of the State.

This is not a film for aficionados of squealing tyres, special effects and all the other trite associated with blockbuster Hollywood epics. This is a film with respect for a real people and the extraordinary courage they showed in pursuit of a noble ideal in defiance of the British Empire and the Catholic Church; the notion that we are all free born to make our own decisions.

Loach treats the viewer and subject matter with intelligence and concentrates on exploring the motivations behind the war and the subsequent divisions. For an Irish person to see this film, is to immerse himself or herself in a collective memory long suppressed. It is to experience the reality of a small group of young men and women, isolated in the wilds of West Cork at a time when communication with, and knowledge of, the world outside the local parish was rare.

All these men and women knew was that they were fighting the British for the survival of their democratically elected government in the first Dáil and by extension their freedom to decide 'sinn fein' the kind of state we would create. The reasons why we, in the words of Frank O'Connor, eventually decided to merely "paint the post boxes green and carry on as before" is implied skillfully in the film in the debates following the truce and leading into the civil war.

This is also film about the stoicism of a whole people, epitomised in the scene where, Peg, the grandmother, who having known eviction during the famine years, refuses to move from her farm after the British have burned out her farmhouse, preferring instead to live in the chicken coop, resolute in her conviction that no one would ever again evict her from her home. It is about the defeated ideals of the 1916 Proclamation of Independence wherein we promised ourselves that "all the children of the nation would be cherished equally". It is about the betrayal of friends by friends, it is about those who rationalise compromise at the expense of others. Ultimately this is a film about the struggle between people and power and how that power is used or abused once it is gained. Loach demonstrates once again that cinematic realism is not simplistic, but a seamless narrative telling a complicated truth. His use of locations are 'spot on' and show a terrain which made it possible for a poorly armed and poorly trained army to 'take on' the greatest global power of the time. His insistence on using local accents lends a great authenticity to every scene. After all, you're unlikely to hear lines like, "we're fighting for a Socialist Republic boy!" in too many films covering the period. But this was exactly the lingua franca used by the Flying Columns in the mountains of west Cork.

As a piece of film making, Loach continues thankfully to eschew the banal traits of Hollywood in favour of the more thoughtful European methods. There are no swooping panoramic shots, no Hitchcock camera angles. Instead we are treated to a cinematography that empathises with the location, action and characters. The audience is lured into the film, so much so, that it's only when the final credits start to role that you realise you've been watching a film. And that's when the awful reality hits you. As you leave the cinema and walk out into Celtic Tiger Ireland Inc, among the planning tribunals, Garda tribunals, child sex abuse scandals, Mercs and BMWs, the cranes littering the skyline, the massive building programmes, the shopping malls and the children begging on the streets, you remember a scene from the film. In a remote bog land, Damian, the central character shoots a childhood friend who had turned informer. Then he turns to his comrades and says in anguish, "I hope the Ireland we're fighting for is worth it". And you look around you and wonder. As Loach said at Cannes: ":Maybe if we can tell the truth about the past, we can begin to tell the truth about the present".

Interview:

Derry Chambers: Congratulations on your success in Cannes. It must be very gratifying.

Ken Loach: Well it was extraordinary. I mean it is gratifying because it's for the whole crew of the film. It's for everybody who took part, you know from the music to the, to the smallest part in the film. So, it was fantastic news. There's a great danger of falling into the lovely trap but what stops you doing that is the fact that we've really drawn blood with the British right wing who have now come out today in their full viciousness and have attempted to kill the film from the word go.

Derry Chambers: What attracted you to Ireland as a story?

Ken Loach: I have been into it since the early seventies, when I first worked with a writer called Jim Allen. We did a series, Days of Hope [1975], and there was a scene in Ireland. A volunteer of the First World War finds himself fighting in Ireland. Reading about it all those years ago it's obviously one of those pivotal moments in our shared history.

It changed the course of events but it was also like a classic way an imperialist power deals with its colonies. First of all ruthless oppression, then safeguarding its interests by dividing the opposition, and a settlement which, satisfies their short-term interests, but leaves a long lasting legacy of pain for the people involved.

Derry Chambers: As a historical film what relevance do you think The Wind That Shakes the Barley has for today's society, both Irish society and global society?

Ken Loach: Obviously history never repeats itself exactly but I think it has a lot to say. I don't know about the film but the period has a lot to say. I mean you can see what happens when there is an occupying force in a country very clearly in Ireland. The racism that it engenders in amongst the people, the occupying forces and in the way they're taught how to treat the people they're oppressing, the casual brutality that arises from that, the failure to abide by the democratic decisions which is where it all came from in 1918 and the refusal to recognise democratic decisions, as in Nicaragua, in Chile.

That shows us what the West thinks and by extension what the west thinks of democracy when it gives them the wrong answer. It's also about human beings, about families and about how siblings' relationships' develop and so I hope it's about a lot more things than just the obvious politic comparisons.

Derry Chambers: You've spoken before about the cooperative way you make films. The whole production crew is equally responsible for the end product and also can take the acclaim. This script, I've read, apparently you have a different writer than the original scripts you envisaged making.

Ken Loach: Em well, that was thirty years ago. I've been working with Paul now for ten years and Paul's family, his mother's Irish and his father's family were originally from Ireland so he had an absolute separate and independent interest in the story. So he and I have been talking about this for ten years. It's absolutely Paul's script. It was just Jim that awakened my interest but it's Paul's script.

Derry Chambers: It's an amazingly well researched film. I couldn't believe that someone had got it so right. There are an awful lot of individual stories in the film, and they're intertwined with the greater National Question, how important were these individual stories in the greater question of the Stolen Republic? There were careerists and opportunists in it. Who exactly do you see the Republic was stolen from, given that there was such a diverse group of people and all went into the struggle with different agendas?

Ken Loach: It's a complex question that it isn't it? As you say there were many strands to the Republican movement. People who just wanted to change the flag and people who wanted a social revolution and that's typical of movements for independence. They're united while there's common enemy. When that common enemy is out of the picture, then of course, the divisions occur. I mean obviously our inclination is towards those who wanted the social revolution and the line that Connolly argued. That is the social programme of the first Dail, which one of the characters quotes. How that was subverted is again part of the narrative isn't it?

Derry Chambers: Indeed.

Ken Loach: Clearly that was the side that the British wanted to insure was defeated because they had such strong interests there. A lot of it is the struggle of people against power, I think. Again while the Nationalists, while the question of the flag and National sovereignty is an issue, it can hide the people who are on the same side, who on class terms, are not on the same side. It's always a struggle for leadership, I think. With the loss of Connolly of the 1916 leadership, I guess what we'd see as the progressive side of the Republican movement was obviously much weakened.

Derry Chambers: I can hear your critics, or the critics of the film, now saying you're just replacing one set of truths with another, that you are ignoring the circumstances or the truths that are inconvenient to your thesis that no great crusade is ever noble and that you will be accused, I have no doubt, of telling a one sided story.

Ken Loach: People obviously accuse you of that when you attack the received truth or the version that the establishment perpetuate. This is one reason why they hold onto their powers, that they write the history. There's the old saying from Milan Kundera that the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting and I think that it's absolutely our history to be reclaimed. They want they to write the struggle for social justice out of history and it's our job to make certain they can't.

Derry Chambers: In that context the superpowers have embraced a good versus evil dichotomy. Do you worry that you might be simply offering up new stereotypes based on the same dichotomy rather than exploring the full complexity of the human experience?

Ken Loach: I challenge that, that's just an assertion, If anybody were to be foolish enough to assert it I'd challenge it. I would argue that people in the film are very rounded, that they would change sides from one side to another, that both of the two brothers, the two central characters, are men of great integrity. They take the decisions they take for the best possible motive. They're put in a very difficult dilemma through the cleverness of Britain in deciding where to pitch the Treaty so that they knew they would divide it down the middle. They knew they would keep on side the people who had the same class interest as them. The people in the film, I would argue are very rounded because you see them shift from one position to another. People who were allies become enemies. People who were pragmatists become idealists. Take the character Rory for example, he's a very strong nationalist. When it's a question of do you support the Republican cause or do you support the merchant is not getting his way but is actually supporting the struggle with money for weapons he's for taking his money and letting him leave the court free but when it comes to the question of do you accept the treaty, well he's against it so his alliances shift and we did our best to reflect that complexity so that it's not simply, Irish good, British bad, which would be the simple way of doing things.

Actually one of the officers in the British Army who's been through the First World War says, "Well what do you expect from these men they've been in the trenches? They've experienced all that, well what do you expect? How do you expect they're going to behave?"

Derry Chambers: I'm ringing from Cill na Martra, which is quite close to Macroom. It was nice to see so much of the authentic neighbourhood in the film. How important was location?

Ken Loach: It was very important. We just wanted to be able to describe the landscape and show what an important part the landscape played in the war and dictated the kind of war it was; also to acknowledge that resistance was fiercest in that part of Ireland without making any of the characters actual historical figures because you needed the freedom within the drama to try and build conflicts into the characters; to show why the landscape was almost a character in the story was very important.

Derry Chambers: You know you're fairly famous or infamous, depending on your point of view for employing non-professional actors. There was great excitement locally here when it became known that you were making a film. How did you go about casting the film?

Ken Loach: I worked with a very nice woman called Una Carney, who works in Cork in the theatre as a writer and director and she knew all the Cork actors, so we saw lots and lots of Cork actors. Of course everyone who is meant to be from Cork is from Cork or from the county of Cork, and so she found all those people. She also went amongst the different organisations and community organisations and we met people through GAA, we met people through school, we met people through clubs, through recommendations and just saw lots and lots of people. If we'd had the resources we could have had many more people in the film. They were actually a joy to meet really and to work with.

Derry Chambers: The line that sticks in my head from the film was "we're fighting for a socialist Republic boy" [laughter]. How important was getting the local accent right?

Ken Loach: Absolutely essential, because it's important that when people in Ireland see it they recognise that we've taken the trouble to be accurate and authentic because there's nothing more patronising to people than bringing people from outside because they're supposed to be a good actor and they put on a funny voice and think they're real.

That drives me mad. I think it's very patronising and quite insulting really. So it's a way of being respectful to a people not to do parodies of who they are and think it doesn't matter. I think you have to be really respectful.

Derry Chambers: I was reading what the actors had to say about their characters and it seems like the majority of them felt they were acting out their own personal histories, they took ownership of the parts. Is that normal in your films?

Ken Loach: Well that, that's the point of doing it yes, absolutely. That's very important because when you want the part played on screen, you want someone who plays it from that point of view, not somebody who makes a judgement about the character and says oh, this is a bad man, this is a good man. You want somebody who plays it from inside the personality, so that they're driven by their own logic, their own imperatives and identifies with it, absolutely. When we're doing it I never talk to somebody about, what does your character think? It's always, what do you think or what would you do? That kind of thing.

Derry Chambers: And you would cast with that in mind?

Ken Loach: Absolutely.

Derry Chambers: The fact that Damien (Cillian Murphy's character) is a doctor and chooses the Republican struggle over his own, his more legitimate and respectable professional career, was this a way of linking his character with say Che Guevara and the left wing international movement?

Ken Loach: I mean eh, I think em, we had Ernie O'Malley in mind, he was a doctor. From reading his book there was quite a strong republican sentiment amongst his fellow students and we wanted somebody who courted that dilemma of having a useful career, and you can argue that a doctor can be as much use as anyone.

So we wanted a real genuine dilemma and we also wanted a character who would really know about the poverty that he was talking about. The father is a farmer who is more well established, someone who hires people, so that he choose against his class interests in a way. So all this was carefully thought through all that.

Derry Chambers: You're obviously seen as a realist and as a campaigning film maker. How do you find a balance between social commentary and art?

Ken Loach: A key question is what story do you tell? What is the way into that story and what characters do you establish that will be able to tell that story without saying what you want the audience to think? So that you want a group of characters that have an inbuilt sense of contradictions and conflicts and their unresolved issues so that, as the film unfolds, those issues become resolved and through that you say everything you want to say really. That's actually the balance but I think that once you establish a group of people you've actually got to be true to them. That's the priority. You've got to be true to them. If it's a choice between wouldn't it be nice if the character would do this but actually the character would do the other thing then you've got to stick with what the character would really do.

Derry Chambers: What do you think is the role of cinema in society today. Is it merely to entertain or should it also teach a lesson and provoke thought?

Ken Loach: It shouldn't have one role. A simile I've used before is, it should be as broad as a library. You should have all kinds of different films - documentaries, fantasies, realist stories, you have all kinds.

The problem we have at the moment is it's just the industrial cinema that we get 99% of the time. In France, for example, it's not as bad as that and there's a wider range of films available and I think that's what we need, well, certainly in Britain. I don't know about Ireland but certainly what we need is just a wide range of film so it's like in the theatre, so that you should just have a wide range of plays.

What would it be like if you went to the theatre and all you saw were American plays or if you went to an art gallery and all you saw were American pictures and American sculpture, you'd think it was a bit one sided but that's what we've got in cinema.

Derry Chambers: Hopefully the win at Cannes will improve your chances of finding a US distributor. The likes of Micheal Moore and all the other alternative left wing films, they're proving a commercial viability and they've also shown that there's an appetite for alternative left films in the States. What do you think is your difficulty with finding a distributor there?

Ken Loach: Well I think our films are much more European in style and approach, and American cinema tends to be very exploitative, very, I think, melodramatic. It's very underlined with music, it's very sentimental, it wallows in the violence and I think American audiences are conditioned to that. Whereas our films are, I think, I hope, are more reflective, more observed and it's just not the American style. So we've never been dependant on America. None of our money's ever come from America. We've been looking much more to Europe.

Derry Chambers: You did say somewhere that, political optimism comes from the long-term. The fact that this film is set in the past, and it reflects into the present, the dreadful has already happened and the Republic has been stolen. Do you feel that it can be stolen back or does the dream always exceed the reality?

Ken Loach: Well I think if it's a dream, it's a dream. It is just that.

Derry Chambers: Maybe vision is the right word.

Ken Loach: Vision, yes, absolutely it can. I mean feudalism finally cracked didn't it? Yes of course it can, and I think the imperatives are much stronger now because, not only is capitalism driving us to terrible wars, it's, actually destroying the planet. We won't be able to sustain ourselves if we continue at the rate we are. So that suddenly sets a time limit on this current economic model I think because if we continue as we are, and the system itself is rapacious, if it continues as it is. Obviously everybody knows. even the American ex vice president is saying it now, the planet will be destroyed. So there is a new imperative on finding a different mode of production and a different model for production. I think absolutely the Republic can be reclaimed. Again, it's a struggle for leadership and the more intense it gets the more the kind of false consciousness prevails, but you know you just have to battle on as best as possible I suppose.

–   Derry Chambers, Ireland

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