[tps_title]8. Kes (Ken Loach, 1970)[/tps_title]
Films concerning kids – or a kid, rather – often trend toward depictions of children who are lonely and ostracized, and whose greatest challenge is just trying to belong. Ken Loach’s Kes is something of a paragon of these films; subsequent works like My Life as a Dog (1987), Ratcatcher (1999), and The Selfish Giant (2013) would almost be unimaginable without its influence. The astonishing David Bradley is 15-year-old Billy Casper, a sullen, emotionally (and often physically) bruised boy, who when not being bullied at school only has a home life of neglect and abuse to look forward to. He finds respite in a small falcon he acquires, a relationship that allows him to nurture a passion while imagining better horizons. Loach works in his favored mode of social realism, and it is deployed to gut-wrenching effect here: stripped of artifice or treacle, the film is a raw nerve, an impassioned look at a child grasping for surcease in an unforgiving environment.
See also: Films listed in paragraph, as well as The Black Stallion (1979), Let the Right One In (2008), and Tomboy (2011)
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