The Old Oak is probably, at 87, Ken Loach's final picture. The Old Oak is a pub in what was once a mining town in Northern England but now does not have enough jobs to go around. The conflict in the story has to do with a group of Syrian refugees who are re-settled in the town. Several of the pub's regulars deeply resent someone other than "our kind" settling into what they see as their space. There are no easy answers, but there is some reason for optimism by the end of the picture. One note, Loach uses non-professional actors who speak a working class variety of English that might only be comprehensible to Americans using subtitles. Library DVD with my family.
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