Ken Loach's World

"They call it flexible labour," said director Ken Loach in a recent interview. "What that means is it’s good for the employers but not good for the people who work. And I think this shift from stable employment to casual labour has not been explored significantly yet." The U.S. premiere of Loach's new film, Its A Free World, an exposé of the exploitation of migrant workers in Britain, opens the 2007 DC Labor FilmFest next Thursday, October 11. "Paul Laverty and I wanted to make a film about immigrant workers for some time," Loach told Berit Kuennecke. "Paul has been interested in the subject ever since spending time in Los Angeles with Central American workers while writing the script for our earlier film Bread and Roses. Both of us were also following closely what was happening here with the arrival of new workers from eastern Europe. What interested me was how the experience of workers has changed. We've  gone from the security of a job that would often last a lifetime to casual labour, agency work and short-term contracts." "We wanted to make a film from the point of view of the exploiter rather the exploited," said Loach. "Which would have just been too predictable. We wanted to look into the process of exploitation from the employer's point of view, to try to understand that mentality." Tickets for the October 11 screening are going fast: order online now. Click here to read the complete Loach interview.