I turned down the OBE because its not a club you want to join when you look at the villains whove got it. Its all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest.
Interpretation
Ken Loach rejects the OBE due to its associations with exploitation and questionable values.
In this quote, Ken Loach expresses his disdain for the Order of the British Empire (OBE), highlighting that it is often awarded to individuals who embody what he considers despicable qualities, such as patronage and loyalty to a monarchy that represents a legacy of colonialism and oppression. By refusing the honor, he critiques the values associated with the OBE and the imperial narrative it represents.
In practice
In a speech addressing inequality, one might quote Ken Loach to highlight the dangers of institutional honors tied to exploitative systems.
Film can do lots of things: It can produce alternative ideas, ask questions, just record the reality of what's happening, it can analyze what's happening. Of course, most commercial films are controlled by big corporations who have an interest in not doing those films.
A film has got to demand to be made. Otherwise - if it's just, 'Shall we? Why not?' - you shouldn't make it.
I think it's time British filmmakers stopped allowing themselves to be colonized so ruthlessly by U.S. ideas and stopped looking so slavishly to the U.S. market. It demeans filmmaking when they do that.
We have to defend the migrant workers and give them our support and demand that they have the rights that workers here have from day one, but absolutely hate the system that forces people to leave their country, leave their homes, leave their families, to go somewhere else to be exploited.
He had the air of a spy in a melodrama, missing nothing, liking nothing, looking forward to the great day when everything would be turned upside down.
I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.
The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shews in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven: and the gross air of the world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.
When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.
The very attention given to finding out if the mind can be completely quiet is quietness.
History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.
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