A soul does not need wings to fly, but sometimes a pair of wings can save one. Ken Loach's entire cinematic cosmogony, and perhaps the very essence of British kitchen sink realism, could be condensed into this poetic and brutal crasis. Kes is not a film about a boy and his hawk. That would be like saying that Moby Dick is a novel about a fishing trip gone wrong. Rather, it is a funeral elegy for childhood, a visual sociological treatise on the tyranny of class expectations, and one of the most heartbreaking testimonies to the ephemeral beauty that can sprout from the mud of despair.

Released in 1969, in an England that was shaking off the psychedelic dust of Swinging London to face the industrial crisis and social tensions of the 1970s, Loach's film plants itself fiercely in the gray heart of Yorkshire. Our anti-hero, Billy Casper (an unforgettable non-actor, David Bradley), is an almost feral creature, a small-time thief and dreamer trapped in a world that has no time or space for dreams. His home is a bed shared with his older brother, Jud, a miner whose cruelty is matched only by his despair. His school is a secular purgatory, a factory for future unemployed or miners, presided over by a teaching staff that oscillates between resigned apathy and pure sadism, embodied by the memorable Mr. Sugden, the gym teacher who imagines himself Bobby Charlton in a farcical and violent soccer game.

In this landscape, which seems to have come out of a lithograph by L.S. Lowry animated by Zolaesque anger, Billy has no future. His fate is sealed: the mine. He is a Dickensian character deprived of all Victorian sentimentality, an Oliver Twist whom no one will ever ask for “a little more.” His existence is a sequence of small humiliations, escapes, and failures. Until the epiphany. Until Kes. The kestrel that Billy steals from a nest is not a pet, not a surrogate for affection in the manner of a Disney film. It is something older, purer. It is a “thing of the wild,” a creature of instinct and lethal perfection. When Billy decides to train it, following instructions gleaned from a stolen falconry manual, he performs the first act of genuine self-determination in his life.

Here Loach orchestrates a cinematic miracle. Kes's training becomes a powerful metaphor. It is not an act of submission, but of communion. Billy, the outcast, the invisible, becomes a master. He imposes a discipline on himself that school and family have never been able to impose on him. He finds a language—made up of gestures, patience, observation—that transcends the broken and inarticulate words of his Barnsley dialect. The sequences in which Billy flies Kes in the fields are pure visual poetry, captured by Chris Menges' earthy and lyrical photography. For the first time, Loach's camera, usually anchored to an almost stalking documentary realism, allows itself the luxury of taking off. It follows the flight of the hawk, and with it Billy's soul. In those moments, the boy is no longer a predestined failure; he is an artist, a demiurge, a priest of an atavistic ritual that connects him to something eternal, far beyond the smokestacks and the dust of coal.

There is a central scene, perhaps the most famous, in which Billy, usually silent and sullen, is prompted to tell his class about his experience with Kes. And the unexpected happens: the boy is transformed. He speaks with a passion, competence, and eloquence that no one, not even himself, knew he possessed. For ten minutes or so, Billy Casper exists. He is seen, he is heard, he is admired. It is a moment of grace as dazzling as it is fleeting, a flash that illuminates the abyss of human potential that the system is methodically suffocating. It is a painful moment, because we know it is an exception, not a promise. That system is not designed to cultivate passions such as falconry; it is designed to produce arms for the mine. The only adult who seems to glimpse the spark in Billy, his English teacher, is himself powerless, a marginal cog in an unstoppable machine.

The most fitting parallel for Kes is found not so much in contemporary cinema as in Italian neorealism. There is the same compassionate but not pietistic gaze on the underprivileged, the same attention to the environment as a determining character, the same sense of inevitability that pervades De Sica's Bicycle Thieves. Billy Casper is the spiritual son of Antonio Ricci: both place their only, fragile hope of redemption in an object (a bicycle, a hawk) whose loss means the total collapse of their world. But Loach is, if possible, even more ruthless. If De Sica's ending is an immersion in shared shame and defeat, Loach's is a solitary and silent stab to the heart.

The tragedy, when it comes, is as inevitable as it is random in its brutality. It is not the result of cosmic destiny, but of the petty frustration of a weak man, his brother Jud, who takes out his impotence on the only thing that has value for Billy. The killing of Kes is not just the death of an animal; it is a murder of the soul. It is the final message, shouted without words, from the world to Billy: “You cannot fly. You cannot be free. Your place is here, in the mud with us.” The final sequence, with Billy burying the little body of the hawk on the hill, is a funeral for every dream that has ever been shattered by the banality of evil. There is no catharsis, no lesson learned. There is only the empty silence that follows a cry.

Seen today, Kes vibrates with an almost prophetic power. It heralds the end of post-war optimism and anticipates the Thatcher era, the closure of the mines, the disintegration of entire working-class communities. It is a film that, beneath its simple and linear surface, conceals a layered complexity. It is a coming-of-age story in reverse, a story of “de-formation.” It is an essay on pedagogy and its failures. It is a visual poem about the wild nature that survives in the interstices of industrial concrete. It is, ultimately, the story of an interrupted flight. A magnificent, desperate flight that reminds us that the greatest works of art are not those that offer us an escape, but those that force us to look, with lucidity and a broken heart, at reality for what it is, finding a terrible beauty even in the fall.