When I first watched Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or–winning drama I, Daniel Blake in 2017, it was one of the rare moviegoing experiences I have had where you could audibly feel the entire audience’s empathy come out for the central character. The weighted sighs, the squirming in the seats, the grabbing of tissues, the shaking of heads were all constant and only increased as the film went on. Ken Loach has a tendency to bring that out of his audiences.

It’s not cynical, and it’s not artificially manufactured, either. Loach says what he means, and he says it loudly and clearly.

Art should communicate its politics through its formal visual language first. This approach goes against recent trends of artists rejecting any subtext to deliver cheap political pandering. But Loach, like Sergei Eisenstein, Bimal Roy, or Jean-Luc Godard, is the rare artist whose work doesn’t feel hackneyed when he gets out his megaphone. It’s because what he stands for is unmistakable, both in his words and his images.