My Name Is Joe

My Name Is Joe is a 1998 film directed by Ken Loach. The film stars Peter Mullan as Joe Kavanagh, an unemployed recovering alcoholic in Glasgow, Scotland who meets and falls in love with a health visitor. David McKay plays his troubled friend Liam. The film's title is a reference to the ritualised greeting performed in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, as portrayed in the film's opening scene. The movie was mainly filmed in the council estates of Glasgow and filling small roles with local residents, many of whom had drug and criminal pasts. The Glaswegian Scots dialect of some of the actors are unintelligible to many of the American audience and therefore the film is often shown subtitled there. (Ken Loach has a policy that actors should speak in their natural dialect on film, and his early film Kes faced a similar problem with the South Yorkshire dialect that restricted its distribution even within England). The film won awards in many film festivals, including Best Actor for Mullan at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.