by Federico Grandesso
CANNES, France, May 26 (Xinhua) -- British movie director Ken Loach showed "essential conflict between employers and workers" in his movie Sorry We Missed You, which was in competition at the 72nd edition of the Cannes Film Festival.
The film is about gig economy in modern day England, telling a story of a hard-working family devoted to the two children.
"This idea of casual work is perfect for big corporations because they can turn labour on like a tap," said Loach in a recent interview with Xinhua.
"In the UK, there are university lecturers that can't survive. They are massively qualified but they still do casual lectures here and there and at the end they don't have a living wage," Loach said.
For Loach, nothing has changed. It is "all about exploitation and the method changes according to the new technology," he said.
"Then, in this spiral, they have no responsibility at all -- the result is that you don't have sick or holiday pay, as the businesses are in competition, if one company will not offer these bonuses then other companies will follow suit," the British director explained.
For Loach, a politically involved film director, there is a need to find out where these problems originate.
"The old center-right and social-democratic parties have clearly failed, when they were in power, they failed concerning structural changes -- the issue that we are presenting in my film is that the work has changed into casual and insecure work, mass unemployment, growing inequalities, a failure to tackle climate change and an unsustainable economy," Loach said.
The solution, according to the British director, is a serious left, saying that these problems are coming from the economic structure itself. The competition between the big corporations drives down the cost of labor and reduces care of the environment.
"We need a serious political party that proposes a different economic model based on common ownership, a planned economy and planning world resources," Loach stressed.
"An opposition is needed but you will not change the hard-right government that we have got, because it is built in their politics," he said.
About the film and the casting, Loach said he likes "to give the freedom to actors to express themselves. Actors have to be truthful about who they are."
"We just searched for someone having something original and new to say," he said.
Loach has won Palme d'Or in Cannes twice, respectively in 2006 with The Wind That Shakes the Barley and in 2016 with I, Daniel Blake. In 2014, he received the honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
