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Athens News Agency: News in English, 08-10-20
CONTENTS
[01] Media strike on Wed.
[02] Film director Ken Loach in Athens
[01] Media strike on Wed.
The ANA-MPA will not disseminate any news items between 6 a.m. on
Tuesday and 6 a.m. on Wednesday due to a nationwide strike called by
journalists' unions in the country.
[02] Film director Ken Loach in Athens
Controversial UK film and TV director Ken Loach was in Athens on
Monday, addressing an audience at the Ianos bookshop in central
Athens. Known for provocative films of intense social realism like
'Sweet Sixteen' or 'Cathy Come Home' and a penchant for using
unknown actors drawn from the environment he seeks to portray, Loach
was in the city as the guest of the 21st Film Panorama organised by
the Greek newspaper 'Eleftherotypia', which awarded him during the
closing ceremony on Sunday night for his contribution to the art of
film-making.
"For many, if a film doesn't have an American accent, then it's not
a film," was Loach's opening sally as he addressed the gathering,
outlining the strongly political, left-wing views that have marked
his films since the start of his career in the early '60s until his
most recent successes like "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" in
2006, which came away with the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film
Festival, or the 2007 "It's a Free World".
"A film must pose questions to those that rule us. It must ask
exactly those things that the leaders do not want us to ask. The
most important thing for me is not how a film is made but why," the
72-year-old Loach told his audience, stressing the need to have a
"purpose" behind film-making but admitting that he had also "been
guilty" of lapses on this score.
At another point, he said that people had become used to not going
to films about what is happening in the world and that there had to
be variety in films, just there was in the books stocked by a
library. More controversially, he suggested that cinema theatres
should belong to local authorities, just like libraries, with people
who knew cinema in charge of them rather than managers that were
only interested in how much popcorn was selling during the
interval.
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