“Welcome. House rules: Fighting, drugs, wilful damage to property: minimum one year ban. Unprovoked attacks: Lifetime ban.” These are the rules of the last community pub The Old Oak. This is a special place in the North-East of England, where workers, local miners, and drinkers have been coming together for several decades. Owner TJ struggles to keep the pub afloat, something that is made all the harder by the exodus of locals and the arrival of Syrian refugees in the village. Circumstances bring him together with Yara, a young woman from Syria, and the possibility of two different cultures coexisting no longer seems so impossible.

This is the last film by the revered British filmmaker Ken Loach, now 86 years old, which recently premiered in the main competition at Cannes. The Old Oak is an exercise in compassion without moralising or making unnecessary promises. The director has previously won two Palme d’Or awards at Cannes, the first for his drama about the Irish War of Independence, The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), and the second for his exploration of the labyrinths of modern employment in I, Daniel Blake (2016). From film to film Loach, together with screenwriter Paul Laverty, have turned to exploring the fate of the underprivileged, those hurt by administrative cynicism, and those forgotten by the political elite. His latest film might at first appear programmatic, examining the oak interior of a pub under magnifying glass and seeing it as a microcosm of society, but in it we find exactly that, which can probably be best expressed only in the language of cinema.