I, Daniel Blake

[projekktor id=’27923′]

I, Daniel Blake is a British-German-French drama film directed by Ken Loach and starring David Johns and Hayley Squires.

Daniel Blake (59) has worked as a joiner most of his life in Newcastle. Now, for the first time ever, he needs help from the State. He crosses paths with single mother Katie and her two young children, Daisy and Dylan. Katie’s only chance to escape a one-roomed homeless hostel in London has been to accept a flat in a city she doesn’t know, some 300 miles away. Daniel and Katie find themselves in no-man’s land, caught on the barbed wire of welfare bureaucracy as played out against the rhetoric of ‘striver and skiver’ in modern-day Britain.

A thought-provoking drama, Loach says the film is a response to anti-welfare sentiment in the UK. “The universal story of people struggling to survive was the starting point. But then the characters and the situation have to be grounded in lived experience. If we look hard enough, we can all see the conscious cruelty at the heart of the state’s provision for those in desperate need and the use of bureaucracy, the intentional inefficiency of bureaucracy, as a political weapon: ‘This is what happens if you don’t work; if you don’t find work you will suffer.’ The anger at that was the motive behind the film.”

Originally screened at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, I, Daniel Blake has received critical acclaim since its European release, winning the festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or prize and achieving a 93% rating on RottenTomatoes.com.

I, Daniel Blake is rated 14A.