British Social Realist Directors

Mike Leigh and Ken Loach are arguably the two directors who are most synonymous with British social realism, they grew out of the realist flowering of the BBC in the 1960' they have been making films ever since.

The most hotly talked of new social realist directors of recent times is Shane Meadows who's breakthrough films A Room For Romeo Brass discussed issues of childhood, violence, men and women and the insecurities of men.


I chose to try and gain some idea of how a social realist film is shot, in order to be able to perhaps use some of these techniques in our opening sequence.

I rented Cathy Come Home and Raining Stones by Ken Loach from the school library and had Mike Leigh's High Hopes at home already. I decided I would watch Cathy Come Home and High Hopes and then add to the notes on some of the techniques used in them and the conventions of the genres that I'd started after watching the opening of Bullet Boy (a 2004 film directed by Saul Dibb) in class as part of a whole class exercise.

These notes should be up after I've watched the two films, which I will try and do this afternoon.