Ebla Mari and Dave Turner in The Old Oak (Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber)

Now 87, British director Ken Loach has for six decades been making vital, angry films about ordinary people caught in the vise of merciless market or governmental forces. His latest, which is no exception, is said to be Loach’s final film—he’s announced his retirement from directing, although he’s said that before—and it tackles another typically hard-hitting, timely Loach subject: how the migrant crisis affects the communities that are the destinations for the relocated.

In northeast England’s County Durham, a former mining community where unemployment is high and property values are way down, a busload of Syrian refugees arrives and is housed in several vacant houses. Almost immediately, a contingent of locals are not happy, and their latent racism comes to the fore, mainly by grumbling to each other at the local, derelict pub, the Old Oak, which is run by TJ (Dave Turner).

Although he is having difficulties keeping the place open—even though the loyal locals are seemingly always there, knocking down beers—TJ is hoping not to shut down because it’s the last remaining public space in town. But when he befriends one of the Syrians, Yara (Ebla Mari), a young woman who lives with her mother and younger brother (her father is still in danger back in Syria), TJ decides to update the pub’s closed-down back room so it can be turned into a food pantry for everyone, local and refugee, who needs help. But this makes his already frayed relationships with many of his longtime customers even more flimsy.

Loach and his regular screenwriter of the past three decades, Paul Laverty, have made TJ a thoroughly decent man who has seen his share of tragedy and failure. His wife left him, his grown son refuses to talk to him, and he took over running the Old Oak after his mother, who originally bought it, died. TJ has lived through the same ups and downs that all the locals have, including having a father, a miner, die while on the job. He remembers his dad once said, “We could change the world,” but then he concedes, “but we never did.” (It’s telling that the authorities, those on the council who made the decision to bring the refugees to town, are never seen or even discussed.)

TJ also sees affinities with Yara, an accomplished photographer who, the first time she is in the pub, studies the vintage photos on the walls of the town when it was a thriving mining center. It’s as though she’s at a a local history exhibit, which in many ways it is. TJ and Yara’s friendship—at first tentative, then, after a few missteps, becomes stronger—is a microcosm for their communities, both disparate and desperate, and how they can also come together. Turner (whose third Loach film this is) and newcomer Mari are thoroughly authentic, unactorish leads, and the performances by the entire cast of mainly unknowns ring with truthfulness.

Loach has pared his always unadorned technique even further to the bone, using George Fenton’s score sparingly while observing the interactions and misunderstandings with enormous sympathy. There’s a lovely scene when TJ takes Yara to the towering nearby cathedral that’s been there for almost a millennium. She walks into the cavernous church and is struck by the unearthly beauty of the choir singing a 400-year-old work by Thomas Tallis. Although not entirely free of sentimentality—a subplot about TJ’s beloved dog ends sadly but predictably—The Old Oak is another potent Loach-Laverty collaboration that provides a powerful shock of recognition in its idea that people everywhere, whatever their cultural or religious differences, are at the mercy of the faceless and unseen powers that be.