Kes

Ken Loach's second feature, Kes (1970), is one of the defining works of British social realism and turns up routinely in lists of the greatest British films ever made. Adapted from Barry Hines's novel A Kestrel for a Knave and shot on location in a Yorkshire mining community, it set out the humane, unvarnished style Loach would pursue for half a century.

David Bradley, a local schoolboy with no acting experience, plays Billy Casper, a neglected fifteen-year-old whose bond with a wild kestrel offers a brief escape from a future that class and circumstance seem to have fixed already. Loach works with non-professionals, an observational camera and regional dialect so thick it was nearly subtitled for some audiences, and he finds deadpan comedy in Billy's world (the games lesson is celebrated, and brutal) as well as heartbreak.

Its unsentimental compassion, and its anger at an education system that fails its poorest children, carried far beyond Britain and shaped realist film-making for generations. It also established Loach, later a two-time Palme d'Or winner, as the conscience of British cinema. Kes is tender and very funny, a small story about a boy and a bird that holds a whole society's failures and a flicker of grace. Bradley's unaffected performance and Loach's steady compassion are why it still sits near the summit of British cinema, and why it moves audiences now as much as it did on the day it appeared.