Its a Free World

Star Review

It’s a Free World . . . sees Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty return to contemporary social issues after the success of The Wind that Shakes the Barley. London is an appropriate setting for this most urgent of issues, the exploitation of migrant labour. Instead of a migrant worker ‘victim’, the focus is on Angie – a sharp thirtysomething with an 11 year-old son and a trade unionist father. When she resists sexual harassment at work she loses the latest of her many jobs, this time as a recruitment agent. Angrily she tells her Dad, a council employee for 30 years, that times have changed and she isn’t prepared to end up poor and exhausted. Setting up her own employment agency, she discovers that being caught between the authorities and the unscrupulous employers of casual labour means taking some tough decisions and facing the consequences. Angie is ‘a product of the Thatcher counter-revolution that prioritises . . . looking after number one’. But she’s also another in a long line of Loachian working-class heroines whose story challenges us to think.

Roy Stafford on 5th September 2007

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Film Description

After being sacked by her sexist bosses, Angie sets up her own recruitment agency for migrant workers in East London. She and her flatmate Rose operate from an old pub near a ring road, selecting casual workers from the clusters of immigrants who turn up at dawn each morning. Soon her enterprise has moved into illegality and exploitation of figures on the margins of society.

A contemporary theme of much relevance, Loach and writer Paul Laverty refrain from moralising. Instead of simply highlighting the scandalous exploitation of migrant workers, they seek to challenge the prevailing 'wisdom' that ruthless entrepreneurship should be at the heart of our society and economy.

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DVD Extras

• Deleted scenes.

Film Details

Cast

Kierston Wareing, Juliet Ellis

Technical Details