The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley won the Palme d'Or at the 59th Cannes Film Festival in May 2006, Loach's first Palme after four decades of work, although he had won the Cannes Jury Prize in 1990 (Hidden Agenda) and 1993 (Raining Stones). Loach would win a second Palme ten years later for I, Daniel Blake in 2016, making him one of only nine directors in the festival's history to win the top prize twice.

The screenplay is by Paul Laverty, Loach's regular Scottish-Irish collaborator since the early 1990s. The film engages directly with the 1919-1923 Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Civil War, events still politically contested in Irish public memory at the time of the film's release. Loach drew on extensive consultations with academic Irish historians including Diarmaid Ferriter at University College Dublin and based the central narrative on real and composite figures from County Cork's Third West Cork Brigade of the IRA.

The cast pairs Cillian Murphy (then in the early phase of his career, before Inception and his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer) with Pádraic Delaney in the central role. The supporting cast includes Liam Cunningham, Orla Fitzgerald and Mary O'Riordan. Cinematography is by Loach's regular collaborator Barry Ackroyd. The film was shot largely on location in West Cork in the actual landscapes the events occurred in, with extensive use of period-correct production design and Irish-language passages alongside the principal English-language dialogue. It is now widely cited as one of the major works of Irish historical cinema, alongside Neil Jordan's Michael Collins and Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father.