There are nearly at all times scenes in Loach’s movies the place a group of locals gathers in a shared public area to argue about points that have an effect on all of them. The area right here is the bar of the title, owned and operated by TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner), who additionally spearheads an area charity with his spouse Laura (Claire Rodgerson) that offers donated secondhand furnishings and different home goods to lately arrived immigrants who escaped the conflict in Syria with simply the garments on their backs. TJ is a goodhearted and hard however depressed man who misplaced his spouse and son a few years in the past and dotes on his little canine. He has grown more and more disenchanted along with his core group of patrons, a bunch of males his age who blame immigrants for a gentle decline in dwelling requirements that predates the newcomers’ arrival by a long time. There’s even a gallery of pictures in a shuttered again room of the bar commemorating native labor struggles again when TJ was an adolescent and Durham was nonetheless constructed round coal mining.
The movie begins, like many Loach films, by dropping you into the center of a battle. A bunch of Syrians have arrived on the town by bus and are being harassed by white locals (a few of whom apparently aren’t even from the neighborhood; hate vacationers, principally). One of many refugees is an adolescent named Yara (Ebla Mari), a budding photojournalist who shoots the old style method, on 35mm movie. She paperwork her household’s arrival, together with their harassment by the xenophobes telling them to return to a rustic that is already shattered their spirits (Yara’s father is lacking and presumed useless). One of many bullies steals Yara’s digicam and turns it on the newcomers after which, when confronted, gleefully drops it on the pavement, breaking it.
This sparks the start of Yara’s relationship with TJ, which in the end kinds the spine of “The Previous Oak” and unites the totally different story strands, and the fractured neighborhood as properly. TJ invitations Yara into the again gathering room of his bar, which hasn’t been utilized in a long time as a result of plumbing and electrical issues and presents her a alternative 35mm digicam from a set that when belonged to his late uncle, who took a lot of the pictures of the city’s mining heyday that now dangle framed on the partitions. The movie takes its candy time perusing these footage and even lets TJ give Yara a little bit guided tour by way of time and area as they have a look at them. We get the sense of the burden of the previous (at all times a consider Loach’s films, whether or not the previous is nostalgically fantasized and false or based mostly on one thing actual, which is the case right here) and likewise of the mercurial current. Thus begins a curious, plausible, and sometimes quietly highly effective story consisting of merely written and blocked scenes that discover the dynamics of the city.