‘Ae Fond Kiss…’: the Ken Loach movie informed by 9/11
One of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever filmmakers, Ken Loach emerged during a period of societal and cinematic upheaval in the 1960s and became increasingly intertwined with the notion of depicting social realism on-screen.
Many of his best films focus on class and economic inequalities, the injustices of everyday life, and the plight of the working classes, and the state of constant evolution the country found itself in ensured that as much as his work through the decades adapted and changed with the times, it remained as timely and relevant as ever.
He’s a distinctly British auteur who tells distinctly British stories, but one of his features was born from a global tragedy. Drawing its title from Robert Burns, 2004’s Ae Fond Kiss… stars Atta Yaqub and Eva Birthistle as Casim Khan and Roisin Hanlon, using their burgeoning relationship as the basis for a powerful romantic drama.
A love story unfolding in Glasgow, the young Muslim man and Irish Catholic woman encounter constant opposition to their entanglement, rooted deeply in their own upbringing and circumstances. Casim turns his back on an arranged marriage and threatens to alienate his devout family by doing so, while teacher Roisin is refused a position at a school when a priest discovers the religious background of her paramour.
It’s a story that reflected issues faced by many who’d found themselves in similar situations to the central couple, but as screenwriter Paul Laverty explained to the BBC, the impetus behind the script for Ae Fond Kiss… was a harrowing tragedy that occurred on the other side of the world.
“I suppose really it was coloured by September 11th,” he said. “I was actually in the States when that incident took place. It was amazing just seeing the propaganda and how it was covered. Right in the middle of it I got an email from a friend who’s Asian-Scottish. She told me of the experience of her nieces, how they were scared, frightened and touched by it.”
The scribe thought it would be “really fascinating to see how young adolescents in Glasgow, simply because they were Muslim, are somehow being targeted for something happening in the States.” It was an unsavoury by-product of a terrorist attack that reverberated across the globe, and placing that sense of otherness against the backdrop of a love story was Laverty’s inroad to Ae Fond Kiss…
On a micro level, the writer “thought it would be a really good idea to examine the experience of fellow Scots from a different background” after one of his friends – who’d lived in the country for years – told him they’d always feel like a stranger in their adopted home. As a result, that combination of an inbuilt outsider mentality and the after-effects of 9/11 coalesced in his mind to shape the story he wanted to tell.
