Paul Laverty is one of the world’s leading lefty screenwriters. His historic collaboration with director Ken Loach, British cinema’s lion of the Left, has spanned four decades, producing fourteen films. The Loach-Laverty team’s latest, The Old Oak, was nominated for Outstanding British Film of the Year at the BAFTA Awards and for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival; it’s also a New York Times critic’s pick. Oak is likely the last feature to be helmed by Loach, who turns eighty-eight this June.

The Old Oak is the antithesis of most Hollywood movies — it follows Syrian refugees resettling in an inhospitable UK. Their encounters and interactions with the all-too-human English residents of a depressed former mining community are the heart of Loach and Laverty’s final feature together. At the core of the film, according to Laverty, is a question: “How does one traumatized community react when it ends up side by side with another?”