kierston wareing Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Is a person in their late twenties or early thirties obligated to put social justice above their own career ambitions? Do they have the right to do whatever is necessary to get ahead, and ignore the social costs? If they don't, and they are pushed aside in favor of someone else who will, are they noble or are they a sucker? These are only a few of the questions that are raised in It's a Free World, the excellent new drama from Ken Loach. The subject of the film is illegal immigration, but perceiving the near-impossibility of taking on that subject from the front, Loach has approached it from a fresh and clever angle, that of a 33 year-old London woman who operates a start-up employment agency matching up mostly Eastern European immigrants with employers in the U.K. Intensely proud of her meager independence, Angie (a breakthrough performance by newcomer Kierston Wareing) is put to the test when she discovers that for her small business to survive, she must start doing what everyone in her field does: hire illegals.

Angie has a business partner named Rose (Juliet Ellis) as well as an unsympathetic father and a troubled young son, none of whom are terribly concerned with ensuring her financial security or helping her realize her ambition to actually start a business that will go somewhere. They each have their own needs. Rose isn't presented to us as a paragon of virtue, as you might expect, but rather someone who is simply content to scrape out a living and be what she perceives as a good citizen, and call it a day. Angie, on the other hand, seems constantly propelled by some sort of trauma in her past -- either poverty or a bad living situation to which she refuses to return -- and she throws her entire mental and physical being into doing whatever is necessary to get her little employment agency off the ground. That's her state of mind when an older, seasoned businessman takes her into an office one day and lays it on the line: start bringing us illegal workers or we'll give our business to someone who will.

"It's all sorted! It's all sorted!" Angie yells out at one point during an argument in It's a Free World, the new film from Ken Loach. What she really seems to be saying, however, is 'It's all sordid,' which it is. Angie, played by newcomer Kierston Wareing, is a 33 year-old wrangler of day laborers for the London work force. When the film opens she's hungry and ambitious, expecting not to spend her life standing on the docks forever, but with a little luck to actually start her own firm and make some real money, connecting eager young Eastern European workers to part-time employers in the U.K. However, she soon learns that the real money is not in the ones with all of their papers in order, but the ones with no papers whatsoever. Cinematical had a chance to speak with Ken Loach at this year's TIFF about the film, what it says about illegal immigration today, and what would drive him to make a dramatic, suspenseful fiction film around this topical and explosive premise.

Cinematical: I was reading over the press notes, and in the Q&A someone asked you 'Why hasn't Kierston been discovered until now?' That's the question I had about Angie, though. This is a character that's talented, hard-working, ambitious -- why would she have to resort to an illegal business? Why hasn't the workforce embraced her?

Ken Loach: I think there's a number of answers to that. First of all, nobody knows she's good at it until she does it. She's obviously a working-class girl. You can tell by the way she ... everything about her. Her speech, the way she talks. Men have very stereotypical views of her. She's obviously had a few disasterous relationships in her life, you know. Impetuous. She puts people's backs up sometimes because she speaks her mind. So you can see why she doesn't get on. And she's very kind of flirty, so men, again, they tend to put somebody who, when they want to pat her bottom, that's not the girl they think of promoting. And she plays into it. There's a lot of come-ons from Angie. She looks as though she puts it about a bit. So that's how men will treat her.

Cinematical: Is it realistic to have a woman as the main character? Is that a reality in today's London , in this business?

KL: I think it's very realistic that she does it. I mean, there are people recruiting at all levels. Gang masters, small agencies, big and medium-sized agencies. We met several run by women. So that's nothing new at all. It's the kind of job women are good at. No, I withdraw that. That's a terrible sexist comment. That kind of attention to detail -- a lot of it is secretarial organization. Getting people's registers and finding them work, making sure they're there. A lot of it is just very careful detail, the kind that women traditionally do in offices. So it's quite reasonable and normal that a woman would run her own agency.