Twenty years ago on Friday my father, the film-maker Karel Reisz, died at the age of 76. Along with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, he was a leading figure of the British new wave. Unlike Anderson, who cultivated an outspokenly cantankerous persona, he disliked being interviewed about his work and was never really a public figure. Yet, rather like Ken Loach today, his films were widely admired for compassionately exploring the parts of British society that most earlier directors had ignored. At a time of economic turmoil and intense disillusion with politics, they remain urgently relevant.
Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Czechoslovakia, my father escaped to Britain on a kindertransport at the age of 12 (both my paternal grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz). Though he rapidly assimilated into British life at a Quaker boarding school, then Cambridge and the RAF, he always retained the ability to examine this country with a sharp outsider’s eye. Over and above their technical skill, his films remain resonant for their joyful and curious engagement with people from backgrounds utterly unlike his own. I reserve a special contempt for those such as Dominic Raab, Priti Patel and now Suella Braverman who are themselves of immigrant stock but seem to take pleasure in excluding (and often demonising) others.
