Perfecting live sound is one of the great achievements of modern cinema, and one of its most fruitful artistic consequences is the fusion of documentary and ction where the story benefits from a new natural way of directing the actors and of filming the action on location. Films about childhood, which are prone to being contrived, rediscover a freshness that often paradoxically is their flaw. A child is an actor by nature, and obtaining a performance or a pose from him often means pinning an attitude on him. Here David Bradley’s presence is magical. Ken Loach’s film, with its enigmatic, thought-provoking title, is, first and foremost, a disconcerting portrait of the reality of a child from the Midlands (it was shot in Barnsley, the native city of the novel’s author, Barry Hines). It is also a treatise on falconry, a picture of the educational environment, a glance at a city of North England and its pubs, shops, challenges, a lesson in phonetics and local dialect. Without a message or instruction, Kes is nonetheless a harsh observation of the failure of the educational system, the indifference of adults, ten years of a child in captivity who finds in an adopted falcon (…), a companion of freedom. And when he buries the remains of his falcon, we can read the faint outline of a failed life.

Michel Ciment, Kes, “Positif”, n. 119, settembre 1970