Interview of Ken LOACH, British Director and Winner of the Palme d'Or 2016,&nbsp;for the 10th Anniversary of the Lux Prize, in the EP in Brussels.

Brussels

interview

LUX Cinema Prize 2016 (T)

LOACH, Ken (UK)

10th Anniversary of the Lux Prize: interview of Ken LOACH, British Director and Winner of the Palme d'Or 2016

SOUNDBITE (English), Ken LOACH, British director and winner of the Palme d&apos;Or 2016, Europe is in a mess; wherever you look really, whether it&rsquo;s across the mass unemployment across Europe, whether is the alienation, whether it&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s happening in Greece, being forced to sell off their public assets for a debt they will never pay back... Europe has had ill-considered leadership for a long time, it&rsquo;s driving towards precipices on a political agenda that will bring failure for most of its people, so it is indeed in a mess. And when it&rsquo;s asked to respond in a united way to a catastrophe, like the refugee crisis, it can&rsquo;t.

How to deal with that? These are big political questions. What culture can do and film is maybe to enunciate the basic principles that politicians should work too, and the people should work too, artist and politicians; we are not accustomed to say you have to take one step back to take two steps forward. I think what artists and writers and filmmakers should do is articulate the big principle; and what are the big principles? Like you treat every human being as of equal value, whether they are a young man or a child on a boat in the Mediterranean, or whether they are the CEO of a big corporation, they should all be treated equally. That we should move to greater equality in our economic life, that we should build a society where everyone has a part, you don&rsquo;t have mass unemployment and underemployment and exploitation of work and at the same time have absurd wealth. It&rsquo;s principles like this that art, film, culture... can articulate and then in a way we have to lay down the principles on which Europe should be re-organized.

SOUNDBITE (English), Ken LOACH, British director and winner of the Palme d'Or 2016, (On the role of public broadcasters in europe) The idea that (public) broadcasters are independent has never been true. BBC has never been independent, it has always been the voice of the state, not necessarily of the government, but of the broader issues that the state represents. In the case of Britain that&rsquo;s the right to property and how ... the monarchy, established religion and so on, and the idea that Britain is a democracy, when there is no economic democracy. So there is a number of things that they should begging by acknowledging. How would we reconstruct it? I think that if we were to reconstruct broadcasting there would have to be a basic democracy instead of imposing &lsquo;safe&rsquo; people in the tops of these organisations that will do what the establishment wants, there&rsquo;s got to be a much stronger democracy at the bottom so that people are elected to run the BBC or other broadcasting institutions by the people who work there and also have an input from the wider society.

So you start there, and then the editorial line would have its chance to be independent, because at the moment the editorial line is not independent. So that&rsquo;s critical, there&rsquo;s got to be an element of democracy. Then there&rsquo;s got to be an end to what we have now and I suspect is the same across Europe, which is the micro management from people of the top, over the production process. So that in our country there would be a bigger production team; they&rsquo;ve been cut back, so they have a cameraman, who has to be the soundman, who has to do the lights, and the crew is one man. That should end. You need a proper respect for the craft in television and broadcasting and an end to the micromanagement by dozens of bureaucrats all of whom interfere. So there is two suggestions: democracy and the ending of the micromanagement.

SOUNDBITE (English), Ken LOACH, British director and winner of the Palme d'Or 2016, I think Britain leaving the EU will weaken its contribution to European films because the institution which Europe has put in place for films which are good, they don&rsquo;t go far enough? but what they do it&rsquo;s good, like the MEDIA fund, like Eurimages and so on... they&rsquo;re good. But Britain not being part of the MEDIA fund for example will weaken our connection to Europe and it will inhibit the co-production treaties. The co-production treaties will stay but often they depend on, for example... We benefit from the co-production treaty with Belgium, but for Belgium to enter it, they need some government support and that means we work with some Belgians in the crew, we use maybe some Belgian equipment, and that&rsquo;s all good, we really benefit from that; and the Belgians bring us chocolates and records of Jacques Brel and also their skill, which its&rsquo; terrific and they&rsquo;re brilliant, making brilliant contributions. And we shall lose that, because if the free movement of people ends then we will have to do a big bureaucratic exercise... so it will weaken our connection to Europe.

SOUNDBITE (English), Ken LOACH, British director and winner of the Palme d'Or 2016, The filmmakers are the victims of the system as it is, which that American film is playing much too bigger part in European cinema. So the filmmakers just have to do the best they can. The advice would be to the European politicians, to change their ideas of the free market. The free market doesn&rsquo;t mean the freedom of the bully to exploit and that&rsquo;s what we have deal with American cinema. Hollywood doesn&rsquo;t want partners, they want servants, they want people to be subject to what they want to give us; so I think we need a genuine partnership and that means changing the ownership of cinemas and programming cinemas by people who care about films and not by people who care about fast food. So we need a big change: ownership of cinemas is the biggest change that would really change the landscape and mean that European film would have much more access to cinemas, because a filmmaker has got to have access to audience. If filmmakers do not have access to the audience because screens are full of Hollywood blockbusters then cinema won&rsquo;t work.