In a morbidly ironic turn of events, English filmmaker Ken Loach’s latest public stand came almost at the same time as the death of Ray Brooks, the actor who played in Cathy Come Home (1966), Loach’s breakthrough television drama. Last weekend, Loach refused to accept the 2025 Gran Premio Torino Lifetime Achievement award at the Turin Film Festival. The Turin dispute centered on claims that cleaning and security staff at the city’s National Film Museum, the festival’s parent body, had suffered wage cuts and dismissals after the organization outsourced their services. 

Loach, scheduled to receive the award and attend screenings, withdrew with “great regret,” saying he couldn’t accept a prize, “while the most vulnerable have lost their jobs for their opposition to a pay cut.” The museum insisted the outsourcing followed legal tendering rules and that it bore no responsibility for contractors’ staffing decisions. Loach was not convinced and remained unmoved. He is, after all, as much an agent provocateur as an auteur.

Art and activism

To anyone who has followed his career, the gesture was no surprise. Loach has always been a political filmmaker for whom art and activism are the same thing. Born in the English Midlands town of Nuneaton in 1936, the son of an electrician and a factory worker, Loach studied law at Oxford but gravitated toward theater. After a stint in the Royal Air Force, he joined regional repertory companies. 

He later moved into television direction at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), working on the police series Z Cars before finding his stride with The Wednesday Play. This drama anthology gave Loach the chance to develop his distinctive blend of improvisation, non-professional acting and social realism.

Cathy Come Home was game-changing television: A harrowing portrayal of a young family’s slide into homelessness, watched by over 12 million viewers, the drama caused public outrage, provoked debate in Parliament and is credited with helping to launch the housing charity Shelter. Loach’s subsequent films, from Kes (1969) to Riff-Raff (1991) to I, Daniel Blake (2016), have consistently foregrounded the lives of the working class, the unemployed and the dispossessed, often tackling issues of welfare, labor rights and social injustice.

Alongside critical acclaim — two Palme d’Or wins, British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) and numerous festival honors — Loach has amassed political enemies and predictable accusations of bias. Yet, he has never softened his tone to widen the appeal of his work. The Turin boycott is consistent with a lifelong pattern: A refusal to compartmentalize the personal, the political and the artistic. In Loach’s oeuvre, the filmmaker’s moral responsibility extends beyond the set or editing room, reaching into choices about how and from whom to accept recognition.

Social realism as weaponry

People often describe Loach’s films as “social realist,” but that term can sound clinical, even dry, until you see his art. Social realism in its art-historical sense emerged in 1930s America, particularly in painting and photography, as a way to depict everyday working-class life with brutal, unvarnished honesty, often with a subtext but sometimes obvious statements of protest. 

Loach introduced that spirit into British television and cinema, drawing on the post-war realist tradition of filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, but stripping away the theatrical flourishes. For Loach, social realism was not merely a style; it was a political instrument.

The technique begins with casting. Loach favored and, indeed, still favors non-professionals or actors with lived experience of the worlds they’re portraying. He hands out scripts piecemeal to encourage “workshopping,” spontaneous, unguarded, perhaps random reactions. This method is as much about preserving authenticity as it is about subverting artifice. 

Loach didn’t simulate the memorable scene in Kes where schoolboys are beaten on the palms: He directed real punishment to elicit a believable reaction. It’s a tactic that’s drawn criticism for its toughness, but one that reveals Loach’s priority: Truth over comfort.

Then there’s his visual language. Loach rejects grandiose camera movements, studio lighting and manipulative musical cues. The camera sits quietly in the room, letting characters breathe, while natural light and ambient sound anchor the scene in a recognizable world. The effect is immersive without being ostentatious. He doesn’t invite anyone to admire the cinematography: Everyone should inhabit the moment.

The didactic intent is never far from the surface. Cathy Come Home wasn’t just a drama: It was a reminder about homelessness, as urgent as any charity appeal. Which Side Are You On? (1984) put striking coalminers on national television speaking their own words. I, Daniel Blake (2016), offered a human face to the bureaucratic cruelty of welfare reform, prompting headlines and policy debates. For Loach, the point of realism is not just to depict suffering, but to link it as if by a causal chain to power and to mobilize audiences to think and, better still, act.

This approach situates Loach in a long lineage of artists who have weaponized their medium. Diego Rivera’s murals in Mexico blended portraiture and revolutionary history to inspire workers. Bertolt Brecht used theater to jolt audiences out of passive consumption and into an alarming awareness. Jacob Riis’s late-19th-century photographs of New York tenements were both journalism and advocacy. In each case, the art was inseparable from the politics, not just in content but in the method of production and the intended effect on the viewer.

Loach has often said he mistrusts “neutral” art, arguing that inaction is itself a political stance. For him, film is not a mirror held up to society: It is more like a can-opener, something to pry open the public conscience. This belief explains both his cinematic style and his readiness to walk away from accolades when they clash with his principles. In his hands, social realism becomes a two-edged tool: A faithful witness to lived experience and a prod to collective action. 

Like other social realists, Loach measures artistic success not in aesthetic terms alone but by the extent to which it unsettles the status quo. 

Can we separate the art from the artist?

The Loach–Turin episode prompts an age-old question in cultural criticism: Should, or even can we, separate an artist’s work from the artist’s beliefs, politics or their personal conduct? The temptation is to imagine art as an independent, free-floating entity, available for private enjoyment, detached from the person who produced it and the circumstances in which they created their art. But it’s a temptation we resist. Especially in Loach’s case: The separation is almost impossible anyway, not because his private life seeps into his work, but because the work is his politics.

Unlike, say, Richard Wagner, whose operas can be and often are staged without reference to his antisemitism, or Pablo Picasso, whose cubist innovations can and do receive acclaim without endorsing his behavior toward women, Loach integrates his convictions into every one of his films in such a way that they are inescapable. 

The characters, stories and even the austere visual style are political choices. To appreciate I, Daniel Blake without engaging with its critical evaluation of the British welfare bureaucracy is to miss its central purpose and render the experience of watching the film meaningless. Loach would argue this is not art despite the politics, but art because of the politics.

Yet the art world offers many examples where this boundary between creator and creation is problematic. Michael Jackson’s music continues to fill airwaves and dance floors despite serious allegations about his conduct and he still commands the adoration of legions. Roman Polanski, convicted of a crime in the US in 1977 involving a 13-year-old female, still inspires respect for films such as Chinatown and The Pianist. Wagner’s operas, infused with elements of German nationalism and antisemitic undertones, were beloved by Hitler, yet they remain integral to the classical canon. 

In each case, audiences, critics and institutions face the daunting task of deciding whether appreciating art implies endorsing its maker and whether they can separate art’s aesthetic value from the moral or political failings of its creator.

What distinguishes Loach from many in this company is that his films demand that the audience join him on his home political ground. You can listen to a Jackson song without thinking about his life, or wander through a Picasso retrospective focusing purely on color and form. No cineaste would diverge from the view that much of Polanski’s work is magnificent. 

But with Loach, it’s impossible to uncouple art from politics. Rejecting his worldview while embracing his work is like idolizing a beautiful tapestry but knowing the dye that colored it poisoned the workers who made it: The latter defiles the former. If you don’t go along with Loach’s moral arguments, you can’t treasure his films. Politics is not part of the art: It is the art.

This plaiting clarifies why Loach has both fervent admirers and equally fervent detractors. Those who share his concerns about inequality, austerity and war find his films rewarding and urgent. Those who don’t, or who disagree with his methods or conclusions, find them annoyingly dogmatic. But perhaps that polarity is part of his artistic legacy: To force the question of whether art should comfort the audience, or agitate it.

Loach’s work reminds us that the debate about “separating art from artist” is not binary. For some creators, distinguishable separation is a plausible strategy. For others, Loach in particular, the art and the artist are fused inseparably. Whether that makes his films more admirable or more troublesome depends entirely on the viewer’s willingness to engage with or reject the world he so uncompromisingly presents.

[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is published by Bloomsbury.]

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.