dialect terms than in the original. In a 2013 interview, director Ken Loach said that, upon its release, United Artists organised a screening of the film for some American executives and they said that they could understand Hungarian better than the dialect in the film. The production company was set up with the name "Kestrel Films". Ken Loach and Tony Garnett used this for some of their later collaborations such as Family Life and The Save the Children Fund Film. Filming locations The film was shot on location, including in St Helens School, Athersley South, and Edward Sheerien School (demolished in 2011); and in and around the streets of Hoyland and Hoyland Common. A number of the shooting locations are detailed in a "then and now" comparison page compiled by Adam Scovell in 2018. Textual themes Much of the film's content has been discussed as a critique of the British education system of the time, known as the Tripartite System, which sorted children into different types of schools depending on their academic ability. The view of the creators is that such a system was harmful both to the children involved and to wider society. In his 2006 book, Life After Kes, Simon Golding commented that "Billy Casper, unlike the author [Golding], was a victim of the 11-plus, a government directive that turned out, for those who passed the exam, prospective white-collar workers, fresh from grammar schools, into jobs that were safe and well paid. The failures, housed in secondary modern schools, could only look forward to unskilled manual labour or the dangers of the coal face. Kes protests at this educational void that does not take into account individual skills, and suggests this is a consequence of capitalist society, which demands a steady supply of unskilled labour." Golding also quoted director Ken Loach who stated that, "It [the film] should be dedicated to all the lads who had failed their 11-plus. There's a colossal waste of people and talent, often through schools where full potential is not brought out." In Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television, John Hill noted how the film's producers were against the bleak depiction of educational prospects for children in the film, writing, "Garnett [the film's producer] recalls how, in raising finance for the film, they encountered pressures to make the film's ending more positive, such as having Billy - with the help of