The director Ken Loach last night launched a blistering attack on the government for "playing to the rightwing gallery" over asylum seekers.
Loach, the only British film-maker in the main competition at Cannes, branded the home secretary, Jack Straw, "repressive" and warned that New Labour's anti-immigrant rhetoric was in danger of becoming "a rallying cry for the far right".
His film Bread and Roses, which premiered at the film festival last night, tells how illegal immigrants working as cleaners in Los Angeles overcame their exploitative employers and union racism by organising themselves.
Loach said working on the film, his first in America, brought home to him how Tony Blair was "throwing away" workers' rights won after more than a century of struggle. It also pointed up politicians' hypocrisy towards immigrants and asylum seekers, who were "being used and abused" for cheap labour on both sides of the Atlantic and treated as if they were "a blot on the environment".
"We have governments like Mr Blair's who talk only about the flexibility of labour, who claim to be on the left but are actually continuing the policies of the right, which are all about the rights of the employer. The social, living wage is under attack, and the people who are masterminding this are the people who got to power on the back of a workers' movement which they now want to change."
Loach said the home secretary was contributing to the hysteria over asylum seekers. "Sometimes Straw lets the mask slip, like after that hijack when he said he would send those Afghans back as quickly as possible. His instincts are quite repressive; he plays to the rightwing gallery.
"We have got to keep reminding ourselves that these refugees have come here for a reason. They are not coming for a holiday; it is often because they have been put through some terribly tragedy or hardship or worse. We should be showing them some solidarity, not this."
Loach, director of Kes, Land and Freedom and My Name is Joe, which won a best actor award for Peter Mullan, has never been afraid of taking on controversial subjects or imbuing his work with his politics.
Bread and Roses, which was turned down for a national lottery grant, has been warmly received by critics, but some American critics were uneasy about the film, which makes no bones about how Hollywood's lavish standards of living are built on the poverty wages paid to the mostly Latino illegal immigrants, who clean offices, look after children and work in the fields and factories.
A drama was unfolding at the festival around the Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf, who, barely out of her teens, is the youngest director ever chosen to take part in the main competition, with her film The Blackboard. She shot it in the mountains of Kurdistan without government permission, and her Italian producers smuggled it out.
Like The Apple, which she shot when she was 17, her new film is a subtle allegory rather than overtly political, following two itinerant teachers through a desert landscape on the Iraqi border. Also like The Apple, it has been rapturously received.
The producer, Marco Muller, said he wanted to take no risks with officials in Tehran. But he stressed that neither Makhmalbaf nor her father, the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, had anything to do with the cloak and dagger operation. "It had to be our responsibility. We want them to continue making films in Iran."
Although Makhmalbaf denied that she had ever been censored, it is widely known that religious officials vet all work there.
Useful link
Cannes festival official site
